Black Sadie/Part 3

Black Sadie deserted domestic service for Art. The Countess Lasci set the date and sent her chauffeur in an automobile to convey Sadie to New York. The automobile arrived at Sadie's door in Harrison, New Jersey, at nine o'clock. Peter was long since gone 'on the route.' When the chauffeur knocked at the door, Sadie peeped out and said she would be ready in a minute. 'Yes, Miss,' said the chauffeur. Yes, Miss? How unusual for a white man to call a colored girl 'Miss.' 'Yes, Miss.' Undoubtedly the artistic world was prepared to give life a novel twist. Sadie armed herself in a plush coat and a black hat with yellow roses round the crown to meet the twist. She locked her door and stepped up to the automobile.

Black Sadie got into the Countess Lasci's automobile, in the tonneau. The chauffeur held open the door, and he tipped his cap to her. La, la! What do you think of that for ole Nancy Ritchie's grandchild? 'Cornfiel' nigger' in a limousine! Black Sadie braced herself. She sat up stiff and straight. And the automobile made for Hoboken and the ferry. Pretty ​soon they were in New York. New York: Sadie had never been there before. It was a very large place, and a great many automobiles in the streets; very high buildings, and trains above the streets on trestles. Quite a wonderful sight. Sadie gazed fixedly straight before her, but she saw a great deal just the same. New York. New life. Art.

The Countess Lasci lived in Park Avenue near to the hoardings around the new Grand Central Station. The house had a brownstone front. It was indistinguishable from hundreds of others in the same vicinity. But inside all was different. The Countess Lasci made sure of that. The rooms in her house were 'period.' It was the latest mode for interiors. Nothing incongruous in the Jacobean library peering somberly into the sprightly Louis Quinze drawing-room, nor the Louis Quinze drawing-room peeping coyly through folding doors into a Colonial dining-room. And upstairs just the same . . . Renascence, Directoire, Georgian bedrooms lay contentedly cheek by jowl. The third floor was not so careful, or careless. The third floor had no 'period' rooms. It was uniformly Victorian. Here the maids dwelt in a welter of furniture banished from belowstairs ​. . . Somber walnut bedsteads with excessively high backs wrought in wooden scrolls and garlands, marble-top washhand-stands with a drawer for towels and a cabinet below for chambers, and plenteous bowls and pitchers and slop-jars painted with roses, irises, and birds, variantly. And there were horsehair chairs and sofas in profusion. Solid comfort, but not 'period' according to the taste of the day. The third floor was the wrong period decidedly. But the maids were entirely comfortable.

The Countess Lasci had arranged the entire fourth floor of her house for her studio. She herself was a cartoonist; quite a successful one. Charcoal was her métier. She never touched anything else. Though she did not experiment in oils or washes, she conducted a veritable laboratory for the production of genius. The Countess Lasci always had a new genius on hand, sometimes several. She 'produced' them in her studio. Now she was producing Willie Tompkins under the more arresting name of Chalmer Neale Truben. Thus her protégé was introduced, thus he signed his name and his work, but the Countess Lasci refused to budge from 'Willie' herself.

​The Countess Lasci and Chalmer Neale Truben were sure they had found a treasure in Black Sadie. Chalmer felt an artist's geometric interest in her anatomy. The Countess Lasci hoped to enhance her own éclat by producing a new and quite startling genius. What a unique convulsion New York Bohemia, et cetera, would experience in assimilating a negro girl. Nobody had ever conceived of such a thing before. The Countess Lasci previsioned a furor for negro subjects, a cultus, a vogue in art, literature, music, mysticism. She was most enthusiastic. It should be done. And Black Sadie should be her medium. The studio of the Countess Lasci should blaze with unexpected glory. The city and the world would be so surprised. The New Negro . . . unfathomed depths of mysterious romance, unplumbed abysses of artistic possibilities, untilled fields fertile with new life and inspiration for the somewhat jaded interests of the metropolis. If the Countess Lasci could produce a new fad, what streams of light would play about her head and endow her name with fame. So the Countess Lasci appointed a day for the new experiment to begin. She sent her automobile and liveried chauffeur to Harrison to fetch Black Sadie across the Hudson River.

​Black Sadie came. The car stopped at the door. A maid opened the door. Black Sadie entered the home of the Countess Lasci. The suit of samurai armor in the lower hall gave Sadie quite a start. The spear pointed straight at her. But the dry bamboo grass sticking out of the neck-hole reassured Sadie. She passed by. The maid led the way. 'Madame is in the studio. She will see you there,' said the maid. Sadie tiptoed up the stairs. The carpets were ever so soft. Front door, front stairs, led by a maid—surely the world of art was very different from that of service. Sadie wondered what might turn up next. But she prepared herself for anything.

On the second floor she glimpsed the Spanish bedroom. On the third floor the doors were closed. On the fourth floor she entered the studio. The Countess Lasci and Chalmer Neale Truben met her on the threshold. The Countess wore a smock quite smudged with black. Chalmer Neale Truben also wore a smock. It was smeary with paint. Art.

The studio was one long salle. The windows were sealed up and all the light poured in through series of skylights in the roof. Red-and-gold lacquer screens lined the walls. Here ​and there lay monstrous cushions, divans. Sadie tabulated them 'ticks.' But she was still quite unsophisticated and green. She had much to learn of art. Everything else in the studio in the way of furniture was paraphernalia . . . easels, a platform on rollers, some high chairs and low chairs, and some other things standing around.

Chalmer and the Countess greeted Sadie cordially. They treated her as an equal. That quite dazed Sadie. But she managed to maintain her customary impassivity. Which way would the cat jump next? How strange was art! What was she expected to do? Not an idea.

She was not long in doubt. The Countess made her take off her hat and coat. She stood Sadie in the light. She looked her up and down and round about, humming. 'Divine! Unique! . . . You must not straighten your hair . . . au naturel. What a skull! And the color, ebony! The possibilities in you are infinite. Hmmn! Hmmn! . . . Clothes. You must have clothes. . . . But for the moment . . . How shall we pose her to-day, Willie?'

'Willie' was scraping his palette. He looked up. But the Countess really had no thought ​of giving him the decision. She swept on, thoughts and words together.

'She must stand. Very erect. Tall. Mysterious, but in a strong light. Put her on the platform, Willie. Wheel it about until we get just the correct light.'

Sadie climbed onto the platform. Chalmer rolled it around the studio. Sadie sat in a chair to keep from pitching off the moving stage. When the Countess cried 'Stop!' she stood up for her to decide about the light. When the Countess said 'Go!' Sadie sat down again, and Chalmer pushed her around some more. He got quite winded with the exertion.

At last the Countess was satisfied. 'Stop!' she cried. 'That light is perfect.'

Chalmer stood up. He wiped his brow and his hands with a large white silk handkerchief. Sadie also stood up, but she did not need to wipe anything but her nose. A small handkerchief did for that. The Countess walked round and round the platform.

'Drapery,' mused the Countess aloud. 'Something flowing? . . . No, something close to enhance the height of the figure. A swathe? The very thing, wrapped evenly and closely from head to heel . . . . Willie, she's a genuine ​discovery. The possibilities are infinite. I congratulate you on the keenness and rapidity of your perceptive powers. I should never have given her an eye. The servant girl at the Fishers'! Ha!'

Black Sadie was swathed in a very long strip of red cloth. She stood perfectly still and straight on the platform. The Countess and Chalmer sat on two little chairs before her on the floor. They swabbed away on canvases for half an hour, then Sadie was unwrapped. She had five minutes to rest. She walked around to look at the canvases on which the artists had been working so hard. Swipes, smears, long black strokes. That was all. Now, what was the use in her standing so stiff and still if that was all there was to show for it? Art. Wasn't it mysterious? Even at the end of the morning there was little better to show.

But the Countess and Chalmer conversed together with enthusiasm. Sadie didn't understand a word they said. The Countess seemed to be explaining something, many things to him. He nodded his head. Sometimes he wiped his hands on the white silk handkerchief. He smeared a good deal of paint on it, but he didn't seem to notice. Perhaps he didn't mind ​spoiling his handkerchief. The Countess streaked charcoal on her neck and face. Her fingers were quite black with the coal dust. She didn't seem to notice or mind either. Sadie thought: 'She can wash her hands and face, but the paint will never come out of that silk handkerchief.'

At noon the maid brought trays of lunch. Sandwiches, nuts, tea. The Countess smoked. She offered Sadie a cigarette. Sadie was amazed at the freedom and camaraderie of her employers. She felt greatly embarrassed having to eat with them. The Countess said: 'You can't begin too soon to find your way.' It seemed to Sadie a cryptic observation, or was it a command? She could not tell. She felt very ill at ease. She almost felt like crying. Everything was so strange. These strange people! Would she ever get home to Harrison and Peter!

The afternoon dragged by. Sadie never felt so tired in her life before. The half-hours were lifetimes. Sadie gritted her teeth and stuck her ground. The Countess and Chalmer worked. They accomplished nothing so far as Sadie could see. If they got no picture done, would she get her six dollars? The thought pricked ​her like a pin. Poor Black Sadie, it was too much in one day.

But the end came, and the six dollars, and the automobile and the chauffeur. The Countess and Chalmer shook hands with Sadie and said good-bye. The Countess told her the chauffeur would come for her earlier in the morning, as he would show her how to come on the train and the cars. After that she would be able to come by herself. Sadie was too fagged out to say a word. She grasped the six dollars firmly, convulsively in one hand. So they wanted her to come back to-morrow? Six dollars a day; it was a good deal. For that she had given up her job with the comfortable Fishers and launched out into the high tempests of art. For six dollars she would endure the strain one more day, then she would never, never, never come again. She couldn't. It was too hard, too terrifying. Those white folks were crazy. They didn't know how to treat niggers.

How far from East Orange! How removed from Virginia! As far as hell!

Sadie wept on Peter's arm when she got home. Dear Peter, so safe, so ordinary, so good, her husband. But Peter misconstrued ​the cause of the tears. He saw the six dollars. He thought it was joy that brought the tears. 'Is it er hard job?' he asked, patting her shoulder. 'Are yer tired? Wanter go ter the movies? Wanter go ter church?' Yes, church, the Star African Methodist Episcopal Church, and her own people, her own kind, the Ladies of the Valley of Israel, the Sons and Daughters of the Ethiopian Eunuch.

So Sadie and Peter went to church in Newark, and Reverend Rand preached about the 'African Peoples,' the 'Negro Race,' and what they ought to do and say to assert themselves against the white people. Sadie felt she could never, never assert herself against white people like the Countess Lasci and Chalmer Neale Truben. When they came outdoors, Peter bought some peanuts from the 'guinea,' and the 'Eyetalian' monkey jumped up and down on the curb.

The Countess Lasci plumed herself on having hit upon a novel idea, a new cultus for the intelligentsia—the Negro. How original! Enthusiasm grew in the soul of the Countess Lasci for her astonishing fad. But it was a pleasure she could not enjoy alone. Others must be ​drawn into the exciting vortex of the 'movement.' The Countess launched a vigorous campaign. She talked a great deal on the subject.

The 'movement' must be given momentum. It must take form and direction. Very large ideas swelled up in the Countess's mind. The cult had possibilities in so many ways. It could be brought to influence art in all its departments . . . painting, music, literature, the drama. Black Sadie was well enough to begin with, an exponent of the quantitative idea, but the Countess must have other grist for her mill. She intended to create a demand; grist must be there to satisfy it.

The Countess lectured in several women's clubs. She drew into her studio sympathetic souls whom she fired with her enthusiasm. Young writers were entreated to write on the theme. The Countess Lasci let out an eye for the discovery of some playwright who would portray negro subjects for the stage. She had heard of a young man in Cambridge named Nelson, or something like that, a bold, independent spirit, who might be intrigued with the dramatic side of the question. She would inquire about him further. Just at hand were ​the art schools of New York. They offered the easiest opening. The Countess felt sure she could get them to patronize her fad. She interviewed Mr. Henri. She saw Mr. Bellows. She searched for 'types for models' in Harlem and Brooklyn. She was indefatigable.

Day by day Black Sadie posed in the Countess Lasci's studio. The Countess worked on cartoons, sketches, studies: in chalk, in charcoal, in pen and ink. Chalmer Neale Truben plunged into unfathomable wonders of cubism with oils, a large canvas and two smaller ones. The pictures were to be shown at the Winter Exhibition.

The studio was thronged with admirers of the Countess and Chalmer. Geniuses. The visitors exclaimed over Sadie. Such an unusual 'type.' 'Not a type at all,' remonstrated the Countess. 'She's absolutely unique, sui generis. She's my inspiration for the whole thing.' Bohemia chattered: 'The negro . . . the bizarre, novel idea! So intriguing, so provocative!' Some declared it too fanciful to be worth while. Others were sure it was 'depraved.' It would fall flat. One perspicacious person asked if the cultus was merely intended for something for white people to utilize, or ​were the negroes themselves going to produce a distinctive art? In other words were they blocks to be carved, or plants to grow and bloom? But the Countess had an answer for every question. She rose to meet any occasion.

Black Sadie was entirely nonplussed by all the talk she heard going on around her. She couldn't see any sense in art. How much less in artists! Hour after hour she stood resolutely in the center of the platform wrapped tightly from head to heel in the strip of red cloth. Her eyes were fastened on a golden swastika in the upper corner of a red lacquer screen. In the rest periods she drank a cup of tea and examined the inexplicable things the artists had done. The pictures did not resemble her in the least. Still, six dollars a day was enough for her. Let others do as they pleased.

Sadie learned to make the trip into the city by herself. She came every day. Sometimes the Countess was at home and wanting to work; sometimes she wasn't. The same with Chalmer. Nevertheless, work or not, Sadie got her wages every evening. If her employers were out when she arrived, she waited just the same.

Sadie had the run of the studio. She read ​stories in the magazines. Sometimes she looked at pictures. Behind the lacquer screens scores of canvases stood with their fronts to the wall. Sadie turned them around to see. Some of the pictures were of people with no clothes on. How dreadful! Who would allow such liberties? Sadie, not she!

Sadie was beginning to like her job. She no longer felt suffocated in the studio. The white people no longer terrified her. She enjoyed the daily trip into the city. And she liked posing. She liked her wages too. Besides, there were other little advantages and gains. A great many people came to the Countess Lasci's studio. They often dropped or forgot little articles valuable in Sadie's eyes . . . handkerchiefs, trinkets, scarves, gloves . . . umbrellas, handbags, mufflers, such like. Sometimes the handbags contained quite considerable sums of money. Yes; life was more profitable for Sadie in New York than it had been in East Orange. It was very different, always surprising. Sadie thought she would stick to art.

In a month or two pictures from the Countess Lasci's pen began to appear in the newspapers. Cartoons. The New York 'Herald.' The 'Times.' And there were drawings in the ​magazines. The Countess showed them to Sadie. Sadie was surprised to see them. She would never have recognized herself at all. But it was wonderful to be in the papers. And the names of the pictures . . . 'Negro Girl' . . . 'African Priestess' . . . 'Vital Study' . . . 'Mystic Freedom.' Such titles!

The Countess was prone to read into her work all she herself thought she saw in Sadie . . . mystery, veiled intelligence, emotion, passion. The psychology of the negro. Notions of the Countess. Sadie did not possess any of these delectable qualities. She was merely a colored servant girl snatched by fancy to serve the Countess's whim. Never mind . . . 'the mills of the gods' and all that.

The Countess Lasci took her penchant very seriously. 'The time has come for a new viewpoint towards the African People,' she explained. 'It is a great race, mysterious, ancient. They have been enslaved. . . . Merely their kinetic powers utilized and employed for manual labor. The souls and the minds were never touched. They slept. The vitalities of the spirit have not been permitted to appear. It is our task to bring them out.' The Countess glowed with eager enthusiasm. 'Art in all its ​forms must be the media for this movement of liberation. Hitherto,' she went on, 'the negro has been laughed at, burlesqued, snubbed. The racial power and dignity could not come into play. Bourgeois tyranny! Depressing. Hopeless. But we must constitute ourselves the New Liberators. We shall discover the hidden beauties, the latent powers of the soul of this race. The negroes!'

The 'movement' was the talk of the town. Was it real? Could colored people give anything to art? Unheard-of, daring idea. What would it lead to? Everybody had theories on the subject. How interesting!

Pictures in the papers! Sadie showed some of them to Peter. Peter said: 'My Gawd! Is zat you? Ain't 'ey crazy-lookin'! What will white people want ter do wid us colored folks next?'

That appeared to Sadie an oblique viewpoint. They were her pictures. Peter ought to be proud of them. Instead he criticized. Sadie was offended with him. She felt superior to him too. Who was Peter, anyway? Just a nigger postman, nothing but 'er big black coon.' Were pictures of him ever likely to be in the newspapers and magazines? Not much! Would ​anybody ever make money on his 'mug'? Nix; he hadn't a chance.

So Sadie spoke right up to Peter. She answered him tartly. He wasn't her boss. She reckoned she was free. She made her own money. She didn't look to him for anything. They were not married, anyway. Airs.

Peter's mind struggled with this turn of affairs. It was hard to understand. Was Sadie threatening to leave him? He couldn't tell. She had changed so much since she took the job in New York. She didn't seem the same old girl at all. Was it marriage she wanted? Well, Peter was willing. He said as much. But Sadie sniffed. She said, 'No handcuffs on me.' Now whatever could she mean? Peter was wounded badly. The future seemed quite problematical to him. Puzzled, mystified Peter. Distressed man. Airy, obstreperous Sadie. Vain girl.

One fine Sunday afternoon Sadie went to Newark. She left Peter at home asleep on the bed. She had it in mind to call on Quecene. It was a long time since she had seen her cousin. Sadie walked. She crossed the bridge over the Passaic River from Harrison to Newark. Then ​she strolled up Broad Street. As she stepped along, she glanced at herself reflected in the plate-glass windows of the shops. The vision pleased her.

The vision pleased her. She looked slim, and she carried herself well. The admiration of the New York artists had made her proud and self-conscious. They admired her poise. They admired her head. So Sadie admired her poise and glanced happily at the reflection of her head in the plate-glass windows. She was well-dressed too. Chic. The artists had taught her that. Sadie was entirely pleased with herself. As she walked along, looking at herself, she repeated phrases she had caught in the studio: 'Balanced mass,' and she tilted her chin; 'lithe'; 'the smoothest ebony'; 'eyes like carbuncles, perfectly set' . . .

When Sadie came to Market Street, she turned down into the by-ways and purlieus of the city. She thought she remembered the street where Quecene's 'establishment' was. As she hesitated at a corner, not sure which way to turn, the clanging police patrol swept by. A policeman swayed on the step at the back of the patrol-wagon. Sadie looked over his shoulder into the patrol. Inside the 'green ​wagon' sat Quecene and Lucy. Well! so the 'establishment' had been raided! So much for Quecene.

Black Sadie retraced her way. She picked her steps carefully, looking in the shop windows as she went. A little smile played about the corners of her mouth. In Hahne's windows Sadie picked out in her mind's eye all the things she would like to buy . . . dresses, fans, shoes, hose, and a hundred and one other desirable things.

The next day on the ferry from Hoboken to Twenty-Third Street Sadie met Mr. Lowry. How odd that he should bob up in her path again, just after she had seen Quecene too. But Mr. Lowry did not see Sadie. He was too busy. He had a shoe-shine outfit and he went about the ferry-boat polishing the shoes of the commuters. It seemed honest work.

Sadie passed close to him. Her dress brushed his stuck-out heels. She hurried by to the forward deck, where she stood watching New York over the way. The river was thronged with craft. Some gulls flew overhead. Sadie felt very free and happy. Black Sadie.

Amelia Rogers was a discarded genius. The ​Countess Lasci had twice undertaken to 'develop' her. She had twice failed. Amelia had aspired to the plastic arts and woodcarving. She achieved nothing. So she had no money and she lived in Greenwich Village. She made a living by doing figures in plaster for advertisements . . . plaster boys fattening on breakfast foods, plaster dogs wearing patent collars, plaster figures representing quack medicines. Remunerative, but not 'art.'

Now and then Amelia came to see the Countess for old times' sake, and the Countess was always glad to see her. She treated her kindly, like an old lapdog. Amelia was quite innocuous, aimless. Her character was flabby, and she was fat. But she possessed one robust virtue; she never toadied to the Countess. She liked her instead. And the Countess liked Amelia. Far apart as the poles, somehow they managed to be friends. 'I have a single bourgeois friend,' said the Countess—'Amelia Rogers. I appreciate the rest of you, dears, because of that one exception.' The Countess was so piquant, the droll thing!

The Countess never invited Amelia to any of her social affairs. 'She'll come anyway if she wants to.' And Amelia did, but not often. ​Sometimes she turned up at studio teas. She was more likely to come unexpectedly for lunch. If she drifted in, the Countess would exclaim: 'Here's Amelia! Set another place.' And Amelia offered no excuses. Down she would sit and listen placidly to everything the Countess had to say. That was always a great deal.

Amelia made a good foil for the titled exuberance. She absorbed shock. Even the Countess's enthusiasm for her new fad of the Negro failed to move Amelia. The Countess tried to fire her. 'Aren't you thrilled, Amelia? It's all so absolutely new.' 'No,' replied the futile Amelia, 'what is there in it for me?' True; nothing for her. 'I can't stimulate her,' confessed the Countess, 'but I'm positive I don't bore her. Do I, Amelia?' 'Oh, no,' said Amelia, 'not at all.'

One day Amelia came to the studio just at lunch-time. Sadie sat alone absent-mindedly picking a lobster. The maid fetched another plate and a cup. Amelia shared the lobster and drank some tea. Sadie no longer minded eating with white people. It had happened so often since she came to the studio of the Countess Lasci. In her the natural shyness of the savage ​was becoming rapidly sublimated. She was beginning to accept life as it came. Things couldn't always remain the same.

'Are you working this afternoon?' A little tip of lettuce leaf stuck helplessly out of the corner of Amelia's mouth.

'Not likely,' said Sadie. 'There's nobody here. But I must stay till five o'clock.'

Amelia settled herself in her chair. 'I'm glad to find you alone,' she said, sucking in the lettuce leaf. 'I have wanted to talk to you ever since we first met. You see, I am from Minnesota; I have never known any colored girls. I like you. Couldn't we be friends?'

Sadie had never given the matter thought.

'You see,' went on Amelia, 'everybody is talking about you. You are quite famous . . . because of the illustrations in the magazines. It's due to the Countess, of course. And she has started a whole covey of exciting ideas in connection with you . . . all about colored people. They have never been "treated" before. It's a brand-new idea, so the world is greatly interested.' Amelia laughed softly, peeping under her lids at Sadie. She folded her plump hands on the edge of the table. The nails were bad, not kept at all.

​She took up her tale. 'The art schools are wild to have you pose for their advanced classes. But the Countess won't hear of such a thing, at least not until after the Winter Exhibition. You can't be handed around just yet. The Countess wants the first bite out of you. She is baiting the public with you now. Rank exploitation. But she intends to feed them at the Exhibition. She is sure the pictures she and Chalmer are doing of you will cause a furor. First Prize maybe. They must stand absolutely alone in the Exhibition. Still, there'll be a demand for you later. The schools are fun.'

'The art schools have never asked me to work for them,' put in Sadie. 'I have never been to one of them.'

'No, of course not . . . consider the Countess . . . why, she wouldn't . . . Now, I was talking to the freehand instructor at the New York School of Art the other day and he said the Countess had unearthed a gold mine. That's you, of course. He said they all wanted you at the School, the "life" class particularly. He said he had felt for a long time there were latent possibilities in the colored people, something different from "mammies" and "old ​uncles" . . . something less colloquial, a spiritual élan. He said: "Now, this Black Sadie we hear so much about . . ." May I have some more tea? . . . "Mr. Fellows," I said, "why, then, don't you get some models like Black Sadie?" . . . You don't mind my calling you that, do you? It's what everybody knows you by.'

Sadie said she did not mind. She had always been Black Sadie.

'You are so black, you know,' Amelia prattled on. 'Your skin is like black satin . . . wonderful texture . . . and your hair so savage. Fascinating! But, anyway . . . the Countess intends keeping you safe until after she has made her splash. She wants to get some ribbons for that red-haired darling of hers. Chalmer has oodles of money, but all he wants is ribbons. Somehow he can't seem to take any prizes. Well, it was much the same with me. I tried too. So did the Countess for me. But I never could get any attention. I gave up trying to be highbrow. I had to make my living. The Countess gave me up too. But Willie Thompson—Chalmer, you know—the Countess is determined to star him. But I think they are on the wrong tack . . . I don't ​mean with you. Cubism. People think cubism's a joke. They see light and dark, color, and near and far in perspectives, but solids in paint they can't take in.'

The maid took away the tray. Sadie glanced at the clock.

'Is it late?' asked Amelia, starting up. 'I'm due at the Art School at two o'clock. Dear me, I must flurry along.'

She rose to go, reaching for her coat on the back of her chair. Sadie rose too. She suppressed a yawn. Amelia noticed it.

'It will be tiresome staying here all by yourself,' she said. 'Why not come out with me? I shan't be at the Art School a minute. I would like to have you come home with me afterwards. You have never been in Greenwich Village, have you? There's plenty of time for you to be here again by five o'clock, if you must, just for the matter of form.'

Sadie might as well. She put on her hat and her coat.

The Art School was uptown, on the West Side. It was not an imposing place to see, outside. Amelia pushed open the door. They were in a bare hallway and a bare staircase ahead. Students were coming in for the after​noon classes. They seemed a drab lot. Some even wore the old-fashioned pompadour. A skinny girl with no chin brushed past Sadie and Amelia. Her mouth was slightly ajar. She had adenoids. There were a few men and youths. Sorry specimens.

Amelia mounted to the second floor. 'Wait here,' she said, at the top of the stairs. 'I must go in the office to pay a bill. I shan't stay a minute.'

Sadie leaned against the newel post. More students straggled up the stairs. They looked at her curiously. She heard one of them whisper: 'That's Black Sadie, the Countess Lasci's find. Her pictures will be sure to take the prize in the Winter Exhibition.' It pleased Sadie to hear it. Another said: 'What do you think of all this new idea . . . Negroes in art? I don't give a damn for it myself . . . too far-fetched entirely. Coons ought to stay in the cornfield and the kitchen where they belong.' These words stung Sadie. She was a long way now from the cornfield and the kitchen. How life had completely altered!

Amelia returned. 'Would you like to see some of the classes?' Sadie would. Amelia led the way through the door on the right. In a ​large room sat about fifty girls in semicircles about a platform. On the platform a lot of vegetables were piled up on a box . . . carrots, cabbages, eggplants, helter-skelter. Still-life. In another room children, boys and girls, laboriously sketched plaster casts . . . cones, spheres, cubes . . . heads, arms, torsos . . . Demosthenes, Cicero, Napoleon.

Then Amelia and Sadie walked down a long gallery. On one side were windows; on the other the walls were covered with faded burlap. Row after row of pictures hung against the burlap. Students' work on exhibition. Very terrible. Amateurish. Crayon horrors, charcoal atrocities, water-colors, heavy oils.

At the end of the gallery was a green baize door.

'This is the life class,' said Amelia, and pushed Sadie inside. The sizable room was crowded with students. On a pedestal in their midst stood a young white man stark naked. He posed with his arms folded, one foot thrust forward. He had a prominent Adam's-apple and large red ankle bones. Sadie was petrified. She rushed out into the gallery.

'Oh, that!' laughed Amelia. 'You oughtn't to mind the "life." It's art. Come; I'll show you another.'

​It was a woman this time. An Italian girl. She sat on a square of black cloth spread out on the floor. Her chin rested on her propped-up knees. Her arms clasped her legs. Long black hair hung down her back. She seemed to be asleep. Her skin was ivory white. Lovely.

'The life models get much more pay than the others,' explained Amelia. She gave Sadie a little twinkling look, quizzical.

Amelia lived in Greenwich Village. She called her domicile 'my studio.' One room furnished with a day-bed, a gas-ring, a garbage-can, little else. The door locked with a Yale lock and Amelia kept the key.

Sadie sat on the edge of the day-bed. Amelia knocked about some tea-things. She clapped a tin kettle on the gas-ring. She brought in from the window-ledge a mouldy lemon and a little bottle of cream.

'Let me show you some of my work,' said Amelia. She fetched out of hiding some battered plastercine models and a few pieces of badly hacked wood. 'This is a design for a figure to represent Victory. It's a prize contest. I failed in it. This is a rejected monument. How do you like the little rabbits? Quite cute, ​aren't they?' Amelia purred over her handiwork.

Sadie felt truly sympathetic for Amelia. She was a failure. Misfortune.

The kettle lifted its lid and shot forth a pennant of steam.

'Ah, here's the tea!' Amelia poured out the tea. 'Lemon or cream?' Sadie said: 'Cream, please.' But Amelia slipped a piece of lemon in the cup. Great mistake. When she discovered it, her consternation was overwhelming. She snatched at the cup. It upset. All over Sadie. Sadie sprang to her feet. The tea was very hot.

Amelia screamed. 'Oh, how sorry! Are you burned? Are you drenched? All over your beautiful dress!' She swiped at the front of Sadie's skirt with the piece of newspaper in her hand. She had been holding the handle of the hot tea-kettle with it. 'You are soaked! You must take your things right off. I'll dry them with a hot iron.'

But Sadie did not want to undress. She had never undressed before a white lady before. In the single room there was no private place. But Amelia insisted. And indeed Sadie was very wet. The tea was soaking through everything. It would really be better to take off her ​clothes. Amelia took it for granted she would. She dived into a drawer for a towel. She hooked down a kimono. She searched for slippers.

Sadie slid out of her clothes. Even her shoes and stockings came off. Amelia handed her the towel.

'Oh, you are still wearing your hat!' exclaimed Amelia. 'How absurd with no clothes on.' She flew at Sadie to take away the hat. In her rush she pulled off as well the small black ribbon holding down Saddie's mop of kinky hair. The naps sprang upright, straight out all over her head.

Amelia stood back to gaze at the naked body of Sadie. She gave a cry of admiration. She was delighted. Artists think highly of the nude. So Amelia thought highly of Sadie. 'Let me look at you!' she cried. 'You are wonderful so . . . graceful as a black panther . . . pliant . . . the color . . . bronze . . . satinwood. How perfectly carved!'

Sadie felt pleased with Amelia's praise. After all she did not feel shy. She did not feel embarrassed. It was nice to be admired. She stood quite still in the center of the room.

'Oh, just pose for me a few minutes, please,' begged Amelia. 'While your clothes are drying. ​There! Hold that! Put your arms up . . . at the back of your head . . . look up. Marvelous!'

Amelia had out a board bedaubed with lumps of plastercine. Down she sat on the day-bed. Sadie held the pose and Amelia worked. She worked an hour. A small and very delicate figurine was the result. Amelia also made some rapid drawings on a long piece of canvas . . . sweeping lines, long curves, and some measurements, dimensions. She used a tape-measure to take them.

'There!' she cried. 'Look at that!'

Sadie looked at the figurine appreciatively. It really seemed a likeness . . . whereas Chalmer's cubes and prisms, and the Countess's chiaroscuros . . . well, Sadie didn't see much in them.

While Sadie dressed, Amelia wrote her a check for two dollars. She wrote with a pen made of the rolled-up top of a sardine tin. It was really quite artistic. It did very well for a pen. Sadie was glad to have the check. The afternoon had not been dull.

'Come again,' cried Amelia. 'I am so sorry about the tea!'

Amelia Rogers wrote Sadie a note. She asked her to go with her to the Metropolitan ​Museum. Sadie had never been there. She had heard of the place. She was glad to go.

The Museum was overwhelming . . . so vast, so cramful of lovely and astonishing things. A superabundance of 'art.' Amelia and Sadie walked for several hours through the corridors and galleries. Amelia met many people she knew. She introduced Sadie, always with a little flourish of manner . . . 'Black Sadie, the Countess Lasci's interesting model.' She had triumph in her voice.

The people were very nice to Sadie. They winked at Amelia and shook hands with Sadie. They seemed both interested and amused. Sadie was asked many curious questions, but she had no answers. Instead she sheltered herself under monosyllables or silence. It was imputed to her for wisdom. Amelia was very pleased because Sadie conducted herself so well. Sadie knew how to be circumspect.

Some of the people said to Amelia, 'Stealing!' and laughed. Was Amelia stealing things in the Museum? Impossible. Some said, 'Poaching!' That was mystifying. Sadie only knew the word in connection with a way to cook eggs. One young man, who carried a cane and wore spats, said, 'How did you get the prize out of ​the Dragon's jaws?' Amelia tittered immoderately at that. Sadie couldn't understand why. What was it all about? Who could the Dragon be? Weren't white folks crazy! Sadie was sure she still had much to learn.

However, on the whole, Sadie had a very pleasant afternoon with Amelia in the Art Museum.

Sadie went home with Amelia. Amelia took Sadie out to dinner. They went to a little cellar eating-place called the Cage of Lions. But Sadie did not see any beasts. There were not many people in the eating-house. There was sawdust on the floor, but a few couples danced just the same. Tango. The women all smoked. After dinner, in Amelia's studio, Sadie sat still while Amelia made some plastercine models of her head and face. They were friends. But Sadie could not help feeling how strange it was for the white lady to ''sociate' with a nigger. Sadie was still a little shy.

It was the talk of the art schools and the topic of the day in Bohemia that Amelia Rogers had been seen out with Black Sadie . . . 'stealing the Countess's fire.' People laughed very much. It was a good joke. But nobody told the Countess. Even Chalmer did not know.

​One afternoon, just as Sadie was about to enter the subway at Grand Central, the spick-and-span gentleman, with the cane and the spats, Sadie had seen in the Museum, stopped her. Accidental encounter.

'Excuse me,' said the gentleman. 'I believe you are Black Sadie . . . I do not know your real name . . . I met you in the Metropolitan Museum. You are posing for the Countess Lasci . . . everybody has heard of you. The Countess's illustrations are in all the magazines and papers . . . She promises to show us something extraordinary at the Winter Exhibition.' The gentleman paused and bit his lower lip. Then he added under his breath: 'That is, if nobody steals a march on her.'

Sadie was a little startled at the meeting. She said: 'Yes; I'm Black Sadie. I work for the Countess Lasci.' Sadie's diction was nearly perfect now, little accent.

The gentleman stood staring. He seemed to have nothing else to say. Awkward pause. Sadie made as if to go on into the subway entrance, but the gentleman lifted the head of his cane towards her, deprecatingly. Sadie waited. What now?

'Er . . . aw . . . You see,' said the gentleman, ​'I am Fellows . . . New York School of Art. I thought . . . perhaps . . . it occurred to me when I met you . . . Have you ever done "life"?' he broke in suddenly. 'I mean posed in the nude, naturally?'

'Yes,' answered Sadie, thinking of Amelia.

'Ah, I didn't know . . . I feared . . . Now, I wonder if I could have some of your time? I pay well. I am doing something for the Exhibition . . . imaginative piece. I thought of calling it "Dryad." The girl who posed for me is down with pneumonia . . . I could easily give you the job . . . the same pose, and alter the idea to suit you. Call it "Black Panther" . . . "African Sprite" . . . something like that . . . Credit you with the title, of course. Could you do it? . . . only a few hours a week.' He paused again and bit his lip.

Sadie still said nothing. The gentleman handed her a card. 'That's where I live. Come to-morrow at half-past seven. There'll be a bite of dinner.' He held out his hand. 'Good-bye.'

Sadie shook hands with him. She also said 'Good-bye.' Then she descended the stairs of the subway, downtown train.

Sadie thought little about Mr. Fellows's ​offer. She had no intention of taking him up.

'Ain't no white man going to get me naked,' she assured herself.

Star Church conceived within its soul the necessity for a new 'plant.' Spacious idea, expensive undertaking. No puny means of money-raising would be adequate to the need and the demand. Parties, dances, and suppers in the 'hall' would not net enough for the purpose of rebuilding, no, not in a hundred years. Something larger than local resources was essential. A new 'plant' was 'a tall order.'

So Star Church joined the Ethiopian Interurban Mutual Assistance Association, more exactly described as the 'Pan-Social and Interdenominational Union.' A huge organization embracing scores of 'units' in a dozen large cities, headquarters and dynamic center in Harlem. The large affairs and syndicated interests of the ''Sociation' were controlled by a 'Board.' When the Star Church 'joined,' Reverend Rand was nominated to a seat on the Board. It was the pride and boast of the congregation to have him there.

The ''Sociation' managed things on a grand scale. Any 'unit' participating in a ''Sociation ​activity' secured a proportionate percentage of the profits. The Star Church 'signed up' for a number of 'activities.' The congregation was quite taken out of itself. No local ruts. They paid the handsome 'Membership Premium', and debouched with zest on the 'activities.' They were many and they were varied.

On the fifteenth of December the 'Mammoth Dance' began. It ran for three consecutive nights in three separate localities, Elizabeth, Harlem, New Rochelle. Star Church conscripted a thousand members for the 'Dance.' Some of the conscripts went to Harlem; some to Elizabeth. They distributed themselves numerically over the three nights. A few went each night.

Peter and Sadie bought tickets for the third night. They elected to go to Harlem, the destination of the élite. The tickets were more expensive than those for the Elizabeth 'Dance.' But the Harlem Dance was more 'tony.' From the Star Church busses conveyed the patrons to the dance of their choice and price.

Peter wore a pepper-and-salt suit, and tan shoes, all spang new. Sadie had new clothes too. She put on a green crêpe de chine, very ​narrow in the skirt and hard to walk in, and a panel of black velvet down the back called 'fish tail.' Sadie was happily conscious of her elegance. So was Peter. He was proud of her. Rightly. He helped her into her ponyskin coat.

The Sons and Daughters of the Ethiopian Eunuch had four busses to themselves for the Harlem dance. Two on the Elizabeth beat. A white cloth sash engirdled each bus. It said 'Mammoth Dance, Harlem,' on one side; on the other 'Sons and Daughters Excursion.' Other societies of the Star congregation also ran special busses. They too were engirdled with white sashes describing the nature of their contents and their destination . . . Elizabeth, Harlem. New Rochelle was too far for Newark people.

The busses left Star Church each night at eight o'clock or something after. They returned when they would. The trip was loud and joyful. Music and food enlivened the ride. Some of the boys had banjos. Although the busses bounced pretty heavily, the passengers sang as loud as they could. When they passed through crowded streets the girls let fly confetti and streamers. Such fun! Free ​niggers on a party. Some of the men had 'ticklers' in their hip pockets.

Black Sadie felt very happy. She sat beside Peter. She even took sips from his 'tickler,' but not much. Corn whiskey. She knew all the boys and girls. The mulatto next to her kept his knee pressed closely against hers and sometimes telegraphed with his foot. She let him. What matter? This was a party. They were going to Harlem to the 'Mammoth Dance.'

Niggers . . . it was a relief to Black Sadie to be with her own people. No strain at all. She could relax. 'Art' was hard on the nerves, or, rather, white people were. She rejoiced in the society of the colored people. They demanded nothing but easy happiness, good nature. The jokes were so funny; nobody mystified her with 'high talk.' Sadie did not have to be on her guard with the negroes. Yes, it was very pleasant going to the Mammoth Dance in Harlem.

The bus reached Harlem shortly before ten o'clock. The Sons and Daughters tumbled out, somewhat stiff with the long ride. Peter jumped down before Sadie. The mulatto boy lingered. He assisted Sadie, unnecessarily. ​He slipped his arm under hers so that the tips of his fingers found the swell of her breast. Sadie was aware of the pressure. But she was tired of the mulatto boy. She felt no response towards him. His male touch did not arouse her. On the curb Peter reclaimed her.

The dance was in an armory. Very large. Peter and Sadie separated in the vestibule to go down to the dressing-rooms to leave their wraps. The dressing-rooms were full of people. Sadie checked her hat and coat and came out again immediately. Peter also checked his hat and coat, but he tarried a moment to take a swig from his 'tickler.' Tobacco smoke was dense in the men's dressing-room. Many were drinking. In the lavatory four bucks were shooting craps. Some sporting 'guys' went about enticing the unwary to cards. Peter refused. 'Does I look 'at simple?' he asked. The fellow gave him an ugly look. He departed with a mere grunt for retort.

The dance-floor was enormous. In the center, in a railed-off pen, a brass band blared. Very loud, but not too loud for the size of the hall. The musicians wore sumptuous uniforms, much gold lace, many tassels. The leader had a gigantic silver baton. He manipulated it ​marvelously, never still, twirling, flashing. He twisted and turned himself about in a frenzy. He shouted and sang. He wore a very high red silk hat. Around the sides of the hall were boxes for observers and refreshment booths. Flags and bunting everywhere. Carnival.

Mammoth Dance in Harlem. So many people, swarming. Hundreds of couples, dancing. The band crashed, savage rhythms, rag-time. Streams of people arriving. Niggers dancing. What heat! What an odor of sweat and drink and food! Floods of sputtering white light.

Peter and Sadie moved slowly about in the swaying crush. In a minute or two the mulatto boy touched Sadie on the shoulder. Break. Peter grinned and dropped aside. Sadie saw him later dancing with a fat girl in a watermelon red dress. The girl shone with happiness. But Peter seemed bored. Sadie did not know who the girl was.

The mulatto boy pressed close to Sadie. They one-stepped in a sleepy way, and the boy tried to talk. He stuttered. Sadie could not understand what he said. There was too much noise anyway, music, shuffling feet, ​voices. The boy held her much too tightly. It was hard to breathe. His eager sensuality made Sadie feel sick. Revulsion. No pleasure. As soon as she saw Peter again, she broke away from the dance to rejoin him. The mulatto boy protested. He was vexed. He offered Peter a drink.

Most of the men were drinking. Whiskey. In the corners. Downstairs in the coat-rooms. But everybody was very good-natured. A little harmless horse-play here and there, now and then. No rowdyism on the dance-floor. The 'floor bosses' watched closely. They hushed up noisy people. Improper dancing was instantly reproved.

Peter went to fetch some orange ice. Sadie was so warm. She waited for him by an exit. The crowd from the Star Church was quite lost in this huge throng. There were a great many different kinds of people here.

A tall black man came up to Sadie. He wore a dress suit. A monocle too. On his chin was a white goatee.

'I am Professor Felton,' he said. 'Some one pointed you out to me. We all know who you are. I conduct a conservatory of dramatic music in Harlem . . . voice, instrumental, and ​otherwise, what you will. Could I interest you in anything? Recitals every other Monday. Perhaps you will come?' Perhaps. Sadie said she neither sang nor played.

Professor Felton continued: 'No? Do you dance . . . professionally, I mean? I am just perfecting the department of dramatic dancing. Are you acquainted with Miss Florence Miller? She is one of mine. On the stage now. Quite successful. Growing popularity. There she is.' He pointed to a smallish mulatto in peachbloom silk. She was surrounded by girls and young men.

Sadie had never heard of Florence Miller. But she looked at her with interest just the same. Nigger actress! The world held so many wonders.

'Would you like to meet her?' inquired the professor. 'She's with some members of her chorus. They have just come from the show. Do you know many of the people here to-night? The people in that box, the old gentleman with the white hair and the two stout ladies, they are from Jamaica. Visitors in the States. Very rich. I am from the Islands myself.' The professor spoke with proud hauteur. Negroes from the West Indies con​sidered themselves far above the American 'coons.' 'Harlem is fortunate in having a large society from the Islands.'

Florence Miller shook hands with Sadie. She said she knew all about her . . . 'such an inspiration to the "race movement."' Sadie was mystified. She did not speak. For answer she lowered her eyelids modestly. 'These are some of my boys and girls.' Florence Miller introduced them. 'I know the Countess Lasci too,' she said. 'She gave us a tea on Sunday. We saw some of the drawings you sat for.'

The professor drew Sadie away. He took her round the promenade. It pleased him to point out notable people . . . doctors, realtors, teachers, lawyers, all colored, but some very light. 'Harlem is a great place,' he said. 'You ought to live here. We need people like you close to the center of the "race movement" . . . There's Harvey Joe. He owns string quartets in New York and Chicago . . . several of the large cities. But he lives in Berlin mostly. Those two boys . . . there under the flag of France . . . are comedians. They black up. You ought to see their watermelon act and clog dance. That lady in yellow satin is Madame Steel . . . contralto . . . finer than Schu​mann-Heink . . . Handicapped by her race . . . But the day of colored distinctions is nearly spent.'

The professor prattled on. Sadie stepped delicately beside him. She had on her 'white manners.' Fine manners and pure speech. She knew the trick. Veneer. She came up out of the comfortable 'nigger English' all slurs and gutturals as easily as a beaver takes to land. She shifted her behavior and her speech for the professor and his friends because they were different niggers from her kind . . . almost like white folks. The professor was delighted with her. So refined. Black Sadie!

Peter reappeared with the orange ices. He looked suspiciously at the professor. Different class. Sadie introduced 'Mr. Wright.' But Peter was awkward, and Felton froze towards the Newark colored man. Distinctions finely drawn. Sadie was glad to have Peter again. She slipped back happily into the more familiar context of life. She and Peter ate the orange ices. Then they danced some more.

The social tides washed hither and thither through the dance-hall. Currents. Black Sadie found herself again amongst the people from the Star Church. They had a very happy ​time together, dancing, breaking; laughing, joking. One of the girls, the fat girl with the watermelon red dress, had too much to drink. She was maudlin. It was fun for the others. She said so many silly things. Amusing, drunk people. But the fat girl enjoyed being made sport of. She tried herself. She got down on all fours and danced around. Her dress dragged about her in such a funny way, down in front, up behind. White cotton stockings, and the green garters showed. The girls made a ring about her, dancing and singing.

The mulatto boy wanted to dance with Sadie again. She refused. So he wept, wiping the tipsy tears from his cheeks with his knuckles. Soon he was comforted. A brawny brown lass took pity on him. Off they went on a foxtrot.

About twelve o'clock a group of white people arrived. There was a parley at the door, then they were shown into a box. The Countess Lasci, Chalmer Neale Truben, Corda Van Corda, and some others. Sadie had seen them at the studio, but she did not remember their names. Mr. Fellows was also in the party. The white people took great interest in watching the dance, but the colored people paid very little attention to them.

​The Countess had come with a purpose. She began pointing out people with her fan to Fellows and Corda Van Corda. Chalmer pinned his attention to a pale thin girl in a turquoise-blue dress, hardly any of it. Her body was bony as a cage. The Countess kept ushers busy carrying messages about the hall. She wished to speak to So-and-So. She wanted to meet this or that person. She spied Sadie and waved energetically to her with her fan. So Sadie went up into the Countess's box. Florence Miller came into the box too. She smiled at Sadie.

The hall was stifling hot, the nigger odor strong. The Countess plied a red feather fan and sniffed constantly at her handkerchief with the verbena scent on it. She talked to everybody. Pleasant and loquacious. Some one brought plates of ice cream. Refreshing.

The President of the Floor came up. The Countess was very gracious to him. She asked him a favor.

So a little space was cleared in front of the box. Two of Florence Miller's chorus, a boy and a girl, did a wonderful tango. Then a girl danced alone. She was a contortionist. It was as though she had no spine nor any other bones ​in her body. One of the boys did a clog dance. The Countess was delighted. She gave them each a rose from the large bouquet at her waist.

The Countess said things, sotto voce, to a stout man sitting beside her. He had a white pasty face and the top of his head was bald, only he brushed the hair from the side over the bare spot so that it did not show. When the Countess spoke to him, he wrote down 'memos' in a little alligator-skin notebook.

When the clog dance was over, the Countess and the fat man and the President of the Floor left the box. They walked around to the other boxes, speaking to the people. Corda Van Corda spoke to Sadie. She twinkled at her with her eyes. Mr. Fellows tried to interrupt, but Sadie avoided his eye.

The band played Victor Herbert waltzes . . . 'Kiss Me Again,' and such like. One of Florence Miller's boys asked Sadie to dance.

He danced beautifully. Sadie sensed at once his strength and grace. No nigger shuffle in him. She fell into step delightedly. He was immaculately dressed in evening clothes. His breath smelled faintly of ginseng. He complimented Sadie's dancing. 'You ought to be on ​the stage,' he said. He began to tell her about his life in the theater. They went on tours . . . Chicago, St. Louis, next month the Pacific Coast. He told her about Florence Miller. 'Sometimes she gets angry. Look out! It's terrible. But usually she's a peach. Wonderful!'

One o'clock. Everybody was very happy. The floor was jammed with dancers. Some were dancing with complete abandon. The floor bosses were not so watchful now. Sadie saw some of the Harlem bonton leaving. 'They are going to the night clubs,' said her partner. 'Have you ever been to a night club? Would you like to come?'

But Sadie said no. She was timid at heart. New things held little interest for her. She did not want to lose track of Peter. Sadie did not know where Peter was. She had not seen him since she went into the Countess's box. He was near the fat girl then, patting with the others for her bear-like dance on the floor.

People leaving. Was it late? Time to go home? Sadie did not know. Anyway, why bother? Peter would look her up before the busses left for Newark.

The boy Sadie was dancing with drew her ​into a corner. He had something in a flask. He drank some. And Sadie drank some. It was not whiskey. It made her feel so very happy. She wanted to dance all night. They went onto the floor again, dancing, bodies locked together, thigh to thigh, cheek to cheek. The boy whispered in her ear, but Sadie paid no attention to what he said. She just felt too happy for anything. She wanted to cry and she wanted to laugh too.

There was a scuffle somewhere near the door. Policemen came in. They carried off two or three men. The clang of the bell on the 'green wagon' could be heard in the hall. But few paid any attention to the interruption. Incidental affair.

The music took on a new turn. Intoxicating. Savage. A woman began to scream with hysterical laughter. Very loud. It was Madame Steel, the black Schumann-Heink. She was quite drunk. A wizened little man in a frock coat tried to quiet her. He tried to get her to leave the hall. But she would not go. The yellow satin dress was wet with beer stains. Madame Steel stopped laughing to weep.

Sadie and the boy had another drink from his flask. The flask was silver with a large ​monogram on one side. They stopped dancing and stood close together under one of the boxes. The boy pressed against her, hands on her hips. Male flesh. Female flesh. He took one of Sadie's hands and ran it over his face, kissing the backs of her fingers. Sadie loved him very much. Where was Peter?

The boy said: 'Come downstairs. It's dark in the basement.' He led her away. Sadie was dazed. She did not know where they were going or what for. She followed.

It was dark in the basement. There were people in the shadows. Sadie heard them whispering, breathing. Here and there the red butt of a cigarette glowed. The boy was quite drunk. He wanted to smoke. The light of the match showed many amorous couples in the basement. But the only person Sadie saw was Peter. He was in the arms of the fat girl in the watermelon red dress.

The match went out in a moment. Darkness again. But Sadie broke away from her companion. 'Don't go. Come back,' he called, tipsily, peevishly. Somehow she stumbled out of the cellar. She found her way to the hat-and coat-room. She got her hat and coat and put them on. Then she sat down on the edge ​of a locker, wringing her hands and sobbing, 'Peter! Peter!' Some kind person came with a wet handkerchief, mopping her face. A drink of cold water.

Sadie did not know how she got home. She remembered nothing. Doubtless some of the Star people had got her into the bus and seen her to her door. Very kind. Sadie slept until nearly noon.

Some one knocking on the door. Peter. The door was locked. Sadie would not let him in. He begged and pleaded. His voice was very sad and weak. Sadie upbraided him: 'Where's yo' fat bitch?' she asked. But after a while she opened the door. Peter came in and went to bed.

In the afternoon Sadie dressed, packed her clothes, and went to New York. Peter slept at home. Righteous Sadie would not go back to Peter. She knocked at the door of Amelia Rogers's studio.

With the advice and assistance of Amelia Rogers, Sadie established herself in a room on Ninth Avenue, at the back of the house. The crash of the 'L' hardly disturbed her at all.

Sadie enjoyed her independence. She did ​not miss Peter. Doubtless he now had the fat girl for his wife. Virtuous Sadie motivated by jealousy. But she was no psychologist. She did not split hairs, nor probe her soul. She was well done with being 'married.' The far horizons of a career inflamed her eye: it was better to be free.

Sadie enjoyed living in New York. Amelia Rogers took her shopping. Macy's. Gimbel's. Sometimes Wanamaker's and Altman's. It was nearly Christmas-time. Shopping was very, very entertaining.

One day Sadie passed a lady in a crowded aisle in Gimbel's basement. On the lady's dress dangled a stone-set pin, unfastened, loose. What an easy chance! Sadie turned and pressed by the lady again. The pin was in her hand. But the lady felt the theft. She set up a great clamor. Floor-walkers hurried up. Clerks exclaimed. A policeman appeared as if by magic. 'A colored woman passed by me twice,' proclaimed the lady. 'She must have taken my pin. Where has she gone?'

But Sadie had walked quickly out of the store. Reflected in the glass of the swing-door she saw a floor-walker hurrying after her. Sadie felt her knees grow weak. What now?

​On the curb a Christmas Santa Claus guarded an alms-pot hanging on a tripod. He rang a bell continuously. Children stopped to shake hands with him and drop pennies in the pot. Passers-by sometimes threw in nickels and dimes. Sadie dropped the pin into the pot and quickly walked away. The crowd was dense. It was some time before she was sure she was not followed.

Christmas Day . . . clear, cold. The wind blew dust and grit along the surface of the streets. Wisps of fetid steam seeped from sewer holes. In the afternoon Sadie put on a new tailored suit. She proposed to herself to walk on Fifth Avenue and later turn in at the Countess Lasci's. The Countess was giving a Christmas tea to some of her white protégées and negro friends from Harlem. Whites and blacks together. A new experience to New York people. Both sides of the color line felt the prick of so novel a pin.

Sadie boarded the Ninth Avenue 'L' at Christopher Street. The train of yellow cars banged uptown. At Forty-Second Street Sadie came down the iron stairs. She intended taking a surface car crosstown to the Avenue.

​On the bottom step sat a colored man, huddled up, doubled over. Very sick. Drunk. Disgusting animal. Sadie drew aside her skirts to pass him by. But she did not pass him by, for the man gave a groan and rolled over, face up, and Sadie recognized Mr. Lowry. A sort of tremor or convulsion shook him. Wretched man.

Sadie hailed a taxi. She and the driver hoisted Mr. Lowry onto the seat. He was sick again. Sadie held his head to the window. 'Where to, lady?' 'Bellevue clinic.' Sadie opened her reticule. Twelve dollars, but more at home and in the bank. Sadie was very proud of her first bank account. Checking and savings.

At the clinic an interne and a nurse took charge of Mr. Lowry. Sadie waited in the passage. Pretty soon the nurse came to speak to her.

'Bad case of alcoholic poisoning. Are you responsible? Are you his wife?'

'He married my cousin,' answered Sadie. 'I found him just now in the street, sick, so I brought him here. Yes, I'm responsible.'

What was Lowry to her? Less than nothing; but she hadn't the heart to leave him. Sadie followed the nurse into the ward. Mr. Lowry ​lay in bed. He whined and moaned, but he was not conscious. Tremors shook his body. On his head was an ice-pack. Sadie felt truly sorry for him. Patients in neighboring beds craned their necks to see the newcomer. Would he get well? Conjectures yes and no. But the nurse would not say.

Sadie felt quite sickish after her nasty experience and from the universal smell in the hospital of iodoform. She went out in the corridor and sat for half an hour on a bench. Nobody paid any attention to her. What use her waiting? She called the nurse, gave her name and address, also the Countess Lasci's telephone number. 'I'll be there until after six o'clock,' she said.

Sadie walked a block or two to restore her nerves and her stomach. Then she called a taxi. How easy to pick up the metropolitan manner . . . taxis and the like. White folks and 'art' work a subtle metabolism in the nature. Black Sadie! She drove to the brownstone front in Park Avenue where the Countess Lasci lived.

The Countess did nothing by halves. She felt committed to her hobby for exploiting the negro. She pushed her new fad with vigor. On ​Christmas Day the Jacobean library and the Louis Quinze drawing-room and all the other 'period' rooms on the lower floor of the brownstone front swarmed with guests. Black and white. Harlem society. New York Bohemia, or some of it. In the library a punch-bowl; in the drawing-room tea; and in the dining-room eggnog. Soft-coal fires in all the rooms, wreaths in the windows, tall red candles on the tables and consoles, and the Countess Lasci with her mounds and mounds of white hair.

When Sadie came in, Madame Steel was singing, lifting her double chins and shaking her deep bosom. An anaemic white girl played the accompaniment. She had turquoise rings on her emaciated fingers. The Countess came to Sadie with outstretched hands. 'So late! Where have you been? Merry Christmas!'

Madame Steel came to the end of the Erl König. The professor from the conservatory of music in Harlem grasped her hand. Corda Van Corda applauded. Everybody clapped. 'Divine!' Madame Steel smiled and bowed. She was rather out of breath. Punch restored her.

The Countess smote her palms together. 'We are going to the studio now,' she announced. 'We were only waiting for "Black ​Sadie" to come. You are to view the pictures for the Winter Exhibition before the public has a chance. They will be sent away to-morrow.

The company trooped upstairs to the fourth floor.

The Countess uncovered the pictures. The guests exclaimed.

'There!' cried the Countess. 'These pictures will revolutionize the viewpoint of the old conventional conception of art in mood and technic. They will create a crisis.'

The guests exclaimed again and clapped their hands.

Chalmer explained some of the more abstruse ideas underlying his work. Mathematical esoterism. He acknowledged in Sadie the inspiration to effect his artistic ideals. He talked at some length. One or two people became restive. Corda Van Corda could be heard whispering aloud to Fellows. But the Countess's attention was fastened on Chalmer. Sadie became aware of standing next to the heated person of Madame Steel. The black diva pressed her hand. 'Wonderful!' she whispered. Then to Sadie directly: 'When are you coming to see me? My daughter is so anxious to meet ​you. She is an invalid . . . confined to her room. She writes poetry. We are so anxious to have you meet some of our Harlem friends.'

A Japanese boy handed around a tray of cocktails. The Countess proposed the health of the artist and his model. Chalmer and Sadie had to stand up together on the platform. Everybody cheered. 'Viva!' they shouted. 'Brava!' The cocktails were very good.

The Countess drew Sadie aside. She explained to her that her work as a model was ended. After the exhibition of Chalmer's pictures, any posing she did would be only commercial. The Countess begged Sadie not to cheapen herself. Sadie said nothing. She waited for a denouement of the Countess's reasons. Besides, she had no words with which to cope with the unsettling eulogisms heaped upon her.

'Your future is on the stage. My dear friend, Mr. Isaac Sacks, the theatrical manager and producer, wishes to make you an offer.' She hailed Mr. Sacks.

The pasty-faced man, who had been with the Countess at the Harlem dance, sidled over to the Countess's side. He offered Sadie a job on the stage . . . a revue just going into rehearsal. ​Fifty dollars a week, and expenses. Would she consider it?

Sadie was perplexed. What should she say? Must she accept or refuse on the spot? But at the moment the Japanese boy called her to the telephone.

Bellevue Hospital. Patient dying.

Sadie left at once for the hospital.

Mr. Lowry was still unconscious, but he talked fitfully. 'Oh, my lawsy, lawsy,' he said. 'Oh, my lawsy, lawsy. I'se canned dis time sho'.' His breath came quick and fast. The orderly came with white linen screens to close in the bed. The end must be near. 'Oh, my lawsy, lawsy, Al!'

Sadie sat down on the white iron chair beside the bed. So Mr. Lowry was dying? Odd for her to have picked him up. Where could Quecene be? Mr. Lowry groaned and gagged. Sadie thought she ought to pray or sing. Too bad to 'pass over' without being 'eased across the river.' She began to croon, very softly, and sway her body. Deathbed mystery. Nigger passing.

At midnight Mr. Lowry died.

One afternoon as Sadie stepped down the ​stoop of the brownstone front, she met Mr. Fellows coming up. He lifted his upper lip at her.

'Well, my girl,' he said, 'you didn't know a good thing when you had it. It's too late now. The Exhibition is in two weeks. I hate to rob the Countess of her glory, but her Euclidian artist hasn't a show.' He banged up the steps. Out of temper. But whatever could he mean? How should Sadie know?

Sadie walked slowly down Park Avenue to Fiftieth Street. Some one behind her. Surely Fellows would not be following her. Sadie glanced furtively over her shoulder, but she could not see who it was. She tightened her hold on her handbag. Still footsteps evenly paced behind her. Ahead rose the flimsy bulk of Saint Patrick's Cathedral. In went Sadie at the side door.

After the bright evening light of the street it seemed almost black in the Cathedral. Sadie paused inside the door. She had never been in a 'white folks'' church before, not a big one like this . . . and the Catholics, would they put her out? What's in here, anyway? People coming and going, noiselessly, praying, lighting votive candles. The candles sparkled ​before the shrines, red, yellow, white, green. Somewhere an official sing-song droned peevishly, perfunctorily. The chancel looked like a hotel lobby . . . green carpet, gold chairs, and the long altar for the clerk's desk. A dim corridor ran around behind.

Sadie made for the corridor. She mounted the two or three steps from the floor of the nave to the level of the ambulatory. People passed her, going and coming. Some one caught her arm.

Peter!

How crazy he looked! His clothes weren't nice. His eyes bloodshot. Breath heavy with liquor.

Sadie jerked away. 'Nigger, you lay offen me!'

But Peter clutched her closer. Sadie struggled. There was a scene. People came running. A man in a black gown fetched up a policeman in a hurry. So many people pushing together all at once. Peter was hauled off. It involved quite a scuffle.

Somehow, in the mêlée, Black Sadie pushed her way through the crowd. She was not the object of attention; it was Peter, cursing, fighting. Sadie found her way out at the big west ​door. Safe! Up and down the Avenue, busses. Sadie rode inside one down to Washington Square.

Poor Peter!

But Black Sadie took care to be more watchful on the streets in the future. No nigger man was going to 'nab' her. She was free!

Black Sadie!

The Cage of Lions changed hands. The proprietress, Ada, sold out to get married. She married a Brazilian. He was a professional dancer. They departed for Paris for life, or so they said. Who knows? The new owner wrote Constance in large green letters under the title on the shield supported between the paws of two red wooden lions. This ensign flapped on wires outside the entrance to the restaurant. And business proceeded as usual.

Constance was full of ideas. She enclosed the cashier in a cage. The waitresses wore lionskin mantles with papier-maché heads on top of their own. She herself appeared as tamer, in short skirts and red leather boots, in her hand a long lash. Private eating-booths made like cages ranged down one side of the establishment—five of them. And the ​dancing-space was enclosed by painted wooden barricades like a circus ring. Greenwich Village was greatly intrigued by the arrangement. So unique. The Cage of Lions was thronged. Business was excellent.

But not so the food. Here the new management fell down. Ada built her reputation on the cooking, but Constance seemed to think wooden bars and tawny waitresses more important. Stage-setting. But the habitués of the Village wanted food. They wanted it good. And they wanted it cheap. The Cage of Lions had poor food and uptown prices. That would not do. Business began to languish. Other misfortunes followed.

At Christmas-time the cook struck. One night a little fire started. Two buckets of water would have settled it, but the guests got in a panic and some one turned in an alarm. The firemen drenched the place. They did considerable damage. It was a week before business could be resumed. In the interim the customary patrons sought sustenance at a neighboring 'joint' called the Tin Spout. The Tin Spout majored in delectable Mexican dishes. It was the only place in New York where pulque was attainable.

​Just as things started up again at the Cage of Lions, the cashier came down with diphtheria. The City Health Department locked the doors. It was several days before the official disinfecting was done. Constance beat her breast, but it did no good. She had to wait the lifting of the official ban.

The first night after the quarantine was raised, the police raided the place. That frightened the patrons very much, particularly the ladies. The police arrested an inoffensive young man who that day had somehow got away with a large number of bonds from a downtown banking establishment. How he was traced to the Cage of Lions, nobody knew. It was the concern of the secret service men. Anyway they came. Business was ruined for the evening.

People began to talk about the Cage of Lions. It had got a bad name. Constance faced failure.

Amelia Rogers deeply sympathized with Constance. So many misfortunes. 'Born for ill luck. Poor girl, just divorced and her way to make. Too bad.' Now Amelia also faced failure. It was chronic with her. But the Countess usually came to the rescue . . . with ​rent . . . with clothes . . . bills. But the best of natures wearies. Amelia had reason to suspect the Countess's assistance might not be forthcoming in the future. Amelia sought to line her nest before that day arrived.

She thought out plans. They were feeble enough. But at last a stroke of genius inspired her. Amelia set out for the Cage of Lions to visit her friend, ostensibly to sympathize with her in her many woes, but really to spread before her a business proposition.

Amelia set out for the Cage of Lions. On the way she encountered Black Sadie returning from God-knows-where. But Amelia had no interest in where she had been. Amelia preferred not to dwell on 'has-dones.' The point of the moment was, would Sadie turn with her to visit Constance? Sadie would. They walked down Hudson Street together. Amelia related the sad story of Constance. But her innermost thoughts she did not tell to Sadie. Later. Just now Sadie's corporeal presence was sufficient.

They turned off Hudson Street into a byway and came to the Cage of Lions. Sad sight within. No patrons at all. The cashier sat idle within her cage. Now and then she ten​tatively manicured her nails. The lionesses fluttered meaninglessly near the service door. And Constance wept with her head on a table, her tamer's whip across her knees.

'Constance!' cried Amelia.

And Constance raised her head. A disheveled sight. But Sadie recognized her and she recognized Sadie. Timothy Fisher's wife! What a coincidence!

Amelia demanded food. Constance herself lighted the yellow candle on the table, brought in the soup, and poured out glasses of chianti.

'Your health!' said Amelia, lifting her glass to Constance.

'Lord knows I need it,' said Constance. 'I certainly am Calamity Jane.' She recounted her woes. She dwelt despairingly upon her misfortunes. She itemized her losses. Calamity Jane!

Sadie was glad to see Constance. She had always liked her. She listened to her story with avid interest. It was amusing to hear of the Fishers again. So Constance had divorced Timothy? Or was it the other way around? No matter. Here she was, and in a fix too. Poor Constance. Sadie deeply sympathized with her.

​Amelia sipped some wine. She quite soiled a white china silk waist with tomato purée, spattered carelessly. She listened patiently to all Constance had to say, or nearly all, then she broached her plan. Amelia pointed out that the Cage of Lions seemed to be 'hoodooed,' under a curse.

'You ought never to have kept the name,' she said. 'It's bad luck in the Village.'

'Now the thing for you to do is to start fresh,' the oracle continued.

'I have,' interrupted Constance. She let a spoon fall to the floor, and wept in consequence. Nervous woman. 'I began this business not six weeks ago. Now look where I am. Ruined!'

'The thing for you to do is to start fresh,' persisted Amelia. 'Change the name of the "joint." Alter the style. Feature something.' Amelia paused to cope with a piece of gristle in her mouth. The food was not good. 'You must serve good food. Your "hash" has an unsavory reputation. Pun!' she cried.

'Oh, Amelia, how witless you are!' sighed Constance. 'Greenwich Village has exhausted the possibilities of novelty. The saturation point is reached. There are already too many eating-places. I'm broke.'

​'Hear me out,' protested Amelia. 'I came here with a definite idea. It's a wonderful plan. I make it as a business proposition.'

The cashier left her cage. 'I am going to get my dinner now,' she said, and sat down at a table in a corner. One of the little lionesses brought her the tray of hors d'œuvres. She took an olive and a little caviar. The little lioness retired to the kitchen, trying to preserve her 'kangaroo walk' despite the flapping lionskin. Did she not realize that the 'kangaroo walk' was quite out of date . . . the era of shirtwaists and skirts and thrust-out pompadours?

'Now, this is my plan,' said Amelia. 'I propose that you take Sadie and me into partnership.'

Constance quailed at the thought.

But Amelia explained how that she herself would do the cooking. She said she was a good cook if nothing else. She also explained how popular and well known Sadie had become with Bohemians. She was likely to be more so after the Winter Exhibition. But Sadie's capacities as a model were limited. In art her future uncertain. It would be better for her to tie up to a good business.

​'I am going on the stage,' cut in Sadie laconically.

'Sheer gamble,' answered Amelia. 'You may and you may not. Sacks might bounce you at the first rehearsal. Besides, you haven't signed a line of contract yet. Wait till you do before you talk.' Amelia was sharp, even acid.

'Now, do something new,' continued Amelia. 'Everybody is going crazy about the negroes. Use the idea. Use Black Sadie. Let me explain. Listen. The Cage of Lions has a bad name, as experience has proved. It suggests raw meat and rapacious overcharging. Serve better food. Charge minimum prices. But change the name. Call it "The Jungle Book" . . . everybody has read that. Paint the front to look like an open book . . . texts from Kipling . . . and inside turn it into a jungle. Just! Have a tiny orchestra of African instruments played by colored boys . . . perhaps in gee-strings . . . flutes, tom-toms, cymbals. And now and then Sadie . . . on a little stage . . . a little dance . . . or a mysterious negro melody, a spiritual or something like that. Sadie could do it. Wouldn't it be wonderful!'

​'People are fed up with coon songs,' said Constance.

'But wait,' begged Amelia, biting the edge of a baked potato skin. 'Give the public an eyeful. Dress Sadie up in mostly nothing . . . banana leaves or some grass. Feature "Black Sadie." Sometimes let her dance . . . some jungle rhythm, some savage, abandoned fling. People from uptown will pack the place. Draw the art students. At stated hours let Sadie pose . . . free . . . the famous negro model.'

Amelia gazed excitedly at Constance and Sadie. Constance seemed tempted. Sadie appeared altogether nonplussed.

'Greenwich Village . . . revue . . . cabaret . . . art school, all in one; all in the Jungle Book.' Amelia clasped her hands. She was in love with the thought.

'I can't,' said Constance. 'I've got to give up.' She put her hands to her face, weeping convulsively.

'Why?' demanded Amelia.

'Because I have. I've got to get out. I'm done for. I haven't told you the worst.'

Amelia was aghast. 'Are you in trouble with the police?'

'No; the doctors. I'm going to have a baby!'

​Amelia and Sadie shouted with laughter.

'Just got my divorce, too. And going to have a kid . . . after all the care I took. Oh, I'm in such trouble. I'm so miserable.'

But this was merely hysterics. Amelia felt that she had won. She had won with Constance. But could she bring Sadie into play? The nigger girl was so secretive. She was so sly. Amelia could never tell what she thought or what she would do.

'We'll make large fortunes. Sadie, you'll be rich! It's the greatest chance of your life. Are we agreed? I'll get a contract form and bring it around to-morrow.'

The Jungle Book. Black Sadie. Could Amelia put it through?

A note addressed to Miss Sadie Ritchie. It was from the professor in Harlem. Would she come to a recital at the Conservatory of Music and Dancing? The day and the hour were named. Sadie put on an apple-green frock with bronze leather belt and bronze buttons. Then she set out for Harlem. Subway, Fourteenth Street. Uptown.

Sadie walked east on Fourteenth Street to Broadway. At the entrance to the subway was ​Lucy. Unexpected meeting. She stood very, very close against a tall young man. She had not changed at all. She wore the usual abundance of slatternly finery. Sadie was trim and modish. Lucy put up a miserable contrast.

The tall young man idled against the railings and Lucy leaned against him. She talked and he listened, or seemed to. He wore a brown derby hat, rather over one eye, and his light tan clothes were the essence of elegant cheapness. The trousers fitted tightly, especially the thighs and the knees, while toward the ankles they flared out bell-shaped over the highly polished patent-leather shoes. Congress gaiters. Young nigger buck. New York sporting man. City coon.

Lucy greeted Sadie lovingly. She showed all her teeth. She had two new gold ones. Expensive and shiny. She had lost the originals in a row. 'Meet my fellow,' said Lucy, drawing away from the dressy young man. 'His name's Marcus.' Marcus straightened up. On Sadie he bestowed a single languid and insipid leer. 'Girl from Newark,' said Lucy of Sadie.

Marcus slouched down again. He had no need of effort where women were concerned. Dude. Lady-killer. He was tall; light brown; ​beautifully muscular. His person invariably pleased the female eye. He never doubted but he would please Sadie. Women sought his charms and favors, not he theirs. Marcus.

Lucy inquired into Sadie's health. She stated her own. So-so. Lucy was replete with curiosity and gossip. She had not seen Sadie for a long time. So much to learn and tell. She set about it.

What made Sadie leave Peter Wright? Peter was a good fellow. All the girls loved him. Lucy herself would gladly have 'kept' Peter. Many others likewise: to wit, Quecene. Quecene had been crazy about Peter. She had tried to get him more than once. She was jealous of Sadie. She thought if she had Sadie 'in her house,' Peter would come too. But Peter 'hadn't no use' for anybody but Sadie. Somebody had said that Fat Fanny had got him at the dance in Harlem. Nabbed him when he was drunk. But Lucy didn't know if there was any truth in the report. Lucy said Peter had nearly pined away after Sadie left him. He used to go to church every night and prayed and wept. He 'took to drink' for Sadie.

Such words were balm in Sadie's ear. She listened avidly. Often since the afternoon ​when Peter followed her into the Cathedral had Sadie regretted not having allowed herself to be reconciled to him there. Too late now. Lucy said Peter had got into trouble over something . . . been a week in jail. That had cost him his job with the Post Office. Lucy had heard he was now on the railroad, porter in the Pullman, or 'sumpin'.'

How did Lucy know all these things? Oh, everybody at the Star knew them. Lucy was a member of the Star Church now. The affair of Sadie and Peter was the talk of the 'plant.' 'People said you'd run away with er nuther fellow. Some said a white man had you.' The thought distressed Sadie because it was untrue. She turned the conversation. The languid dandy was listening too keenly.

Sadie asked about Quecene. 'Oh, Quecene!' said Lucy nonchalantly. 'She sho' wuz handed er lemon. Er white jedge give her two years in de pen fer runnin' er disorderly house.' Lucy stated the case calmly, philosophically. It did not concern her, Quecene's crime and punishment. 'She won't be out fer er long time yet.'

And what of the Star? The Ladies of the Valley of Israel; the Dime-a-Day; the Hope-a-Little? Sadie had not paid her dues for months. ​She 'expected' she was 'kicked out.' Not at all. Lucy belonged to the ''cieties' herself. She knew all about the matter. Peter had paid Sadie's dues for a year ahead. Sadie felt a lump rise in her throat. Faithful Peter, blessed Peter. Would she ever see Peter again?

But Lucy could not deflect her attention from Marcus. She took his hand. It had a diamond ring on one of the fingers. Marcus seemed superior to Lucy's endearments and caresses. He languidly withdrew his hand and lighted a cigar. Lucy leaned strongly against him, in the hollow of his arm. 'He knows how ter love,' she said. 'He's mer very own darlin'.' Marcus allowed one eyelid a quiver in order to indicate to Sadie his indifference to Lucy's love. Then he gave Lucy a little shove away from himself onto the railings of the subway entrance. Sadie thought it time to go.

In Sadie's mouth was a salty taste. Peter! She wished she could see him. Suddenly she felt disinclined to go to Harlem. If only she might be going to Newark instead, going to Harrison, in at her door to Peter. But the howling subway train carried her swiftly uptown towards Harlem.

She was late at the recital. A colored boy ​about fifteen years old opened the door for her. He gave her a chair just inside the door. It was the kind of chair undertakers set up in parlors for their own gloomy purposes. The professor sat on the stage. His chair was a monstrous stationary rocker. The arms were covered with plush, and rows of little tassels hung down. They oscillated as the professor gently rocked.

The professor presided. His pupils played and sang, beginning with the youngest children, spindle-shanked little coons in silk dresses or velvet trousers, and ascending a chromatic scale of ages and sizes until the bulk and power of Madame Steel brought the musical numbers to a finish.

When Madame Steel had sung, there was a recess. The guests conversed together. Tea and biscuits called 'five o'clocks' were handed around. The stage was made ready for the second part of the programme. Dancing. The professor came down the hall to speak to Sadie. Madame Steel beckoned her to a seat beside herself.

'Come to-morrow night to a little private soirée at my house,' she said. 'Just a few friends. Poetry. My gifted daughter will read ​some original compositions. Will you come?'

Sadie promised to be there. Harlem people were nice after all.

When the intermission was over, the professor left the stage. He sat down beside Madame Steel. The piano was rolled to one side. All the space was needed for the dancing. A thinnish girl with extraordinarily large calves sat down at the piano. She played Mendelssohn's 'Spring Song.' Four little female coons capered about the stage. The audience clapped when they had done. Winsome dears. They ran down the steps into their mothers' knees. But they had to go back to dance all over again. Encore.

Some clog dances followed. A Russian gavotte. Some Winter Garden stuff by six bouncing girls. Number followed number in quick succession; the pianist gave the cues: a loud chord meaning 'Retire'; another loud chord signifying 'Enter.' The regimen of the Conservatory was admirable.

The conventional dances disposed of, the artistic pièce de résistance brought the recital to a climax. 'Greek Dance' . . . 'steps and poses copied from the buried ceramics' . . . whatever could that mean? Six mulatto girls in white ​nightgowns with jugs on their shoulders. The dance seemed quite stiff in Sadie's eyes. The 'Greek Dance' consisted principally in walking around dragging first one foot, then the other, and sudden halts to shift the jugs. But the audience was very enthusiastic. The 'Greek Dance' had to be done all over again.

The professor stood up. 'Just a little fun to end up with.'

The pianist banged out a rollicking gavotte. A little fat man shuffled rapidly down the stage, his body carried inertly on a pair of immensely alert legs. He was most comical. So droll. His coat-tails dragged on the ground. On his feet a pair of immense loose shoes. On his head a tiny derby hat. How he danced! His body stationary while his feet and legs flew about in every direction, in every possible twist and turn.

Sadie laughed until the tears started from her eyes. She had never seen anything so funny. The professor leaned across the oceanic lap of Madame Steel to explain to Sadie about the dancer. Extraordinary case. A prosperous mortician of the Harlem community. His name was Raggs. He was giving up his business to go on the stage . . . comic dancing. He ​had talent that way. A good engagement had recently been offered him.

The dancers mingled with the company for conversation and applause. The professor introduced Raggs to Sadie. He had a gay spirit. He sat down beside Sadie to talk to her. He told her little stories, mostly about funerals, such ludicrous episodes, and all the time he smiled and winked, gesticulating with his hands. His little fat stomach rested comfortably on his knees, his swinging feet just touching the floor.

A clock struck six. Sadie said good-bye to the professor and Madame Steel. The gay mortician retired to change his clothes. It was dark when Sadie came out into the streets of Harlem. Niggers everywhere, not a white person to be seen. Nigger cops; nigger shops; and the drivers in the taxis were niggers too. Nigger city. Harlem.

The next evening Sadie went to the poetry soirée at Madame Steel's. Madame Steel lived in a four-story apartment house. She owned it. Her own lodging was on the first floor. On the door a plate which said: 'Steel: Singing.'

Madame Steel herself opened the door. The ​professor, two young school teachers, and the professor's boy formed the company assembled. The gay mortician was not present . . . not in the Madame's social circle. Madame Steel led the way into an inner room. On an invalid's couch lay her daughter, the poetess. A cadaverous female probably thirty years old.

Poetry occupied an hour. All, save Sadie and the professor, read original compositions. Each composition required long explanations and elucidations. Madame Steel herself had done a ballad in three verses. The invalid daughter read sections from an ambitious epic. Other sections had been read at previous meetings; further sections would be offered at future meetings. Poetry soirée.

Biscuits with cumquat jelly and coffee for refreshments. The invalid daughter drank a glass of warm milk. The professor lighted a cigar. Cigarettes were offered the girls, the two school teachers and Sadie. They refused. The professor said that was a sign that they were not 'from the Islands.' All the women in the Islands smoked cigarettes. No; they were not from the Islands; no. It seemed disparaging.

Sadie said she came from Virginia. Her grandmother, Aunt Nancy Ritchie, always ​smoked a corncob pipe. But she had never acquired the habit. Some faux pas about this statement. Instead of vindicating her, Sadie saw at once she was lowered in the eyes of the company. The professor coughed. The two school teachers fell into an absorbing tête-à-tête. Madame Steel asked Sadie to come see her 'collection.'

She led Sadie into another room. The chief object of furniture therein was an immense old-fashioned bookcase with glass doors. It was filled with small plaster and metal busts of innumerable musicians and composers. Over the bookcase, hanging side by side, were pictures of Blind Tom and Black Patti. Madame Steel explained who they were. She also showed her an album filled with autographs of singers and performers on musical instruments. Very elevating.

But the real reason of the diva in getting Sadie by herself was to furnish her with a generous amount of sound advice. Madame Steel first bestowed some affectionate remarks and pattings upon her. She told Sadie how beloved she was by herself, the professor, and others 'of our class' in Harlem. But Sadie ought to be warned about 'something.' The 'some​thing' turned out to be a fear on the part of Madame Steel, and 'others,' that Sadie was giving too much to the white people, not enough to her own race. 'It's the new slavery,' she boomed. 'That Countess and her crowd think they own you. They intend to make themselves rich and famous by means of you. Then they will drop you flat.'

Sadie had never conceived of the matter in that light before. She wanted to remonstrate. She wanted to tell Madame Steel of the excellent opportunities offered her by her white friends . . . the Countess's solicitude for her future, Amelia's plan for the Jungle Book. But Madame Steel silenced her with a wave of the hand.

No! Sadie's real opportunities lay in Harlem. Now, Madame Steel would like to chaperon her. She would introduce her to the best 'Island circles.' Sadie must come to Harlem to live. It was necessary in order to avoid Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla was the impression that was getting about that Sadie intended 'to pass'; Charybdis being her compromising residence in lower New York too near to inferior strata of American negroes.

Sadie pointed out that in the nature of ​things it was impossible for anybody to entertain the idea that she could 'pass.' She was much too black. As for the inferior strata, Sadie did not know any of those people up and down Ninth Avenue.

Madame Steel was not convinced. She pursed her lips, puffing them in and out, half closing her sleepy-looking eyes. She was about to proceed to further arguments, doubtless the more weighty ones, when the professor put his head in the door. He wished to say good-night, and might he have the honor of conducting 'Miss Ritchie to the car'? He already had on his Inverness coat. His top hat was in his hand.

The diva said good-bye to her guests. She assured Sadie of her motherly love and interest. She hoped she would consider well the advice given her and act upon it.

Sadie and the professor walked off together. Strangely enough he began at once on the same theme of living in Harlem . . . radiant future, golden possibilities for the colored people, especially Sadie. Now, what was it all about? Why were they all so anxious to have her in Harlem? Sadie couldn't answer such questions. But she wondered very much.

​When Sadie came out of the subway at Fourteenth Street, it was very late. After midnight. Not many people on the street. All the shops were closed, many of them dark or very dimly lighted, except one cigar store. As Sadie passed the door, two men came out. One was Marcus, and the other was somebody else. Marcus saw Sadie. Immediately he began to show off for her benefit. He and his companion walked ahead of her. They talked very loud and laughed a great deal. Marcus 'cut the pigeon wing' on the sidewalk. He strutted. He sang. He whistled. All the time he kept his eye over his shoulder to observe the effect on Sadie. Sadie walked unconcernedly forward, slow enough so as not to overtake the two men ahead of her. Soon they turned a corner and disappeared.

At Seventh Avenue Sadie had to pick her way over the plank-paved roadway and loose working materials lying about. She heard the noise of the night shift working on the new subway. At Hudson Street, Marcus reappeared. He greeted Sadie politely. 'You'se Miss Sadie, ain't yer?' he asked. Sadie let him walk beside her. It was not far to Ninth Avenue and Christopher Street. Sadie lived ​near by. Marcus was very affable. He broke a bar of Wrigley's chewing gum with her.

At Sadie's door they stood talking. Sadie felt quite at ease with him. The Harlem crowd put her ill at ease. But Marcus was her own kind. They stood together talking. Somehow Sadie thought of Peter, Peter walking home with her to Orange Street, standing in the shadow of the door and talking, holding hands. Companionship. Suddenly Sadie felt very lonely and sad. No Peter. By herself in an empty room.

Cold outside in Ninth Avenue. Why not talk inside? Why not have Marcus in for a little supper . . . coffee, cold chicken, bread? She pushed open the door. Marcus followed. He dropped a little pellet in his coffee.

'What's zat?'

'Same ez sugar. Better. Want one?'

When Sadie waked in the morning, Marcus was gone. Her purse was gone. Many of her clothes and trinkets were gone. Sadie felt very dazed and queer. She leaned her head against the foot of the iron bed. That little pellet in the coffee!

After all, perhaps, it would be better to go to Harlem.

​Black Sadie betook herself to Harlem. The professor advised her. Madame Steel gave her eligible addresses. She found lodging with one Mrs. Bremmer. Motherly soul from Alabama. Mrs. Bremmer wore calico dresses somewhat lower in front than behind. And her drawers were more in evidence bunched up in her stockings than her two very thin legs. If her legs were spindling, her body was not, and her heart was as ample as her breast. She called Sadie 'chile' and 'honey.' Sadie began with 'Mrs. Bremmer' in the accepted 'new negro' fashion. But . . . 'Shoo, chile, I ain't no missis. I'se yo' Aunt Sally.'

Sadie had a front room on the second floor. Just vacated by a gentleman who had been shot in a neighboring bar-room. But Aunt Sally did not tell her that. It would have been 'bad luck.' Bad thrift too. Aunt Sally devoted her modest two-story house to 'bo'ders.' She herself dwelt somewhere in constricted quarters beside the kitchen. She also furnished meals. Unlimited pie.

Next door to Aunt Sally's on one side was a pool parlor; on the other a mortician's establishment. The abodes of joy and sorrow, the living and the dead, open day and night, Aunt ​Sally's in between. A nigger boarding-house.

The evening Sadie moved in she leaned out of the window to take her bearings and observe the vicinity. Almost touching her, likewise leaning out of his window, was the smiling face of the mortician. The same who danced the comic dance at the Conservatory. He was sucking an orange, spitting the pits into the street.

Sadie and Raggs greeted each other as old friends. He reached behind him and within and brought forth from some secret store an orange. Raggs tendered the orange to Sadie. It was pleasant leaning on the window-sills sucking oranges, chatting. The mortician did most of the talking . . . Just a little rest before labor . . . and an orange. Two 'cases' awaiting his attention downstairs now. The funerals would be Thursday. Rather a delicate matter to get two funerals run off smoothly in one day. Yes; business was always good. People had to die. And they had to be buried. It was expensive, yes, but the undertakers must live. However he was not interested in his profession. He would make more money on the stage . . . specialty dancing . . . Scandals. Follies.

​The talk was very confidential. Raggs talked. Sadie listened. He told her all about himself. Some of the story was very sad . . . for instance, his struggles as an orphan newsboy . . . the death of his brother-in-law, when the mortician business devolved upon his wife . . . the death of his wife in childbed . . . and now his lonely life, dancing his only solace and joy. At the sad parts, the mortician chuckled. He enjoyed talking about himself.

'I am very religious,' said Raggs, pitting a seed at an alley cat. 'I belong to the Babptist Church. But I would like to be a Jew because that is the oldest religion. I would like to be like my Master in all things. He was a Jew.' He heaved a pious sigh.

But could one be a colored gentleman Jew? Raggs was entirely serious in his intention. He had actually inquired of Hebrew authorities on the matter of changing his faith. He was quite willing to accept circumcision, bath of oil, even synagogue curls and a shawl. But the rabbi listened coldly to his plea. He would not be welcome in the synagogue. He was a nigger. 'Oh, de po' niggers, don't dey have a hell of a time!'

Sadie could not imagine anybody wanting ​to be a Jew. As for religion, she was on much more familiar ground with Aunt Sally than she had been since she came North. Aunt Sally was 'good ole Babptist.' She lived her faith hourly. She sang hymns as she worked. Hymns Sadie knew so well: 'If I could I sho'ly would stan' on de rock whar Moses stood'; 'O sinner, don' yer weep, don't yer moan'; and, 'Running from de fìar, 'scaping outer hell.' 'Befo'-de-war religion, chile,' she said. 'None er yer new African Methodists . . . I'se got religion . . . I'se been under de water. Hallelujah!'

Aunt Sally belonged to Carmel Baptist Church. Corrugated iron. Lost midget of a church in the welter of roaring modern Harlem. In Carmel Baptist Church the fervor of the old South clung to the hearts of a few of the passing elder generation. There sinners and repentance maintained their old-time sway. Moaning and glory for all. But so few. An atavistic power drew Sadie into the familiar embrace of the religion of Carmel Baptist and Sally. Lifelong homelike atmosphere. Rest. Understanding. Home. O Virginia! Down South!

But Harlem 'society' laid its powerful hand ​on Sadie too. And the suction from downtown whitefolks. The 'Island people' desired her. The Countess and Bohemia claimed her. Clay pigeon shot from a trap, potted at by black and white. Nigger fad. Nigger hobby. Black Sadie.

Sadie frequented recitals and dances at the Conservatory. She attended lectures at the African Forum. She went to poetry soirées at Madame Steel's. Once she went to the theater to see Florence Miller. The undertaker gave her that treat. She was thrilled. 'Them niggers is sumpin'!'

Downtown, the Countess exploited Sadie. She drove with her in the Park. People on the Avenue turned to stare at the distinguished white-haired lady with the neat, coal-black girl beside her. Sadie shopped with Amelia in Wanamaker's, Gimbel's, Macy's. Never an end to shopping. Amelia talked constantly about the preparations under way for the Jungle Book. Sadie listened. But she had signed no contract. The Countess still paid her a salary . . . mere bird lime to hold her . . . Sadie's work of posing at the fourth-floor studio was over.

All waited for the Winter Exhibition. Black ​and white alike expected to make a good thing out of Sadie . . . after the Exhibition.

In the mean time Sadie lived in Harlem. She crooned hymns with Aunt Sally. And she leaned on the window-ledge to chat with the affable mortician. He asked her to marry him. He would give her the 'business.' His first wife had been successful at it, why not Sadie? It led into the best homes. Financially, undertaking was good. He could dance while she buried. He hated 'like pisen' to sell the place. Home.

Matrimony with the dancing undertaker? No! . . . Sadie felt bound to refuse . . . on account of his stomach. It was too round and sticking out. It was what Sadie objected to most in the appearance of her neighbor. She really could not think of herself allied to that unwieldy organ. The gay mortician's society was preferable across the window-ledges. Black Sadie said she was sorry . . . yes; but . . . she could not marry him.

The Winter Exhibition. Multitudinous entries, thousands of pictures submitted for judgment to the jury of the Academy. Portraits, studies, landscapes . . . all moods, all ​mediums, every school and style. The accepted choices came into the hundreds only, but just so the galleries were crowded with pictures and statues. The selecting jury worked for days winnowing the wheat from the chaff. They boasted of being impartial in the choice of meritorious efforts. They claimed to be broad-minded and fair. Everybody had a chance. Chance, yes; but many had so little luck. Disappointed aspirants charged the jury with excruciating narrowness of taste. Successful ones thought differently. Of course. But how did so many horrors get in?

The Winter Exhibition. New York foregathered to see it. But not until after the press had had the first view. That was unfair. It was unfair to the public because it prejudiced their minds. They came to the Exhibition with opinions already formed, on the bias, because of what they had read in the papers. It was unfair to the press because they hadn't the public opinion to substantiate and control their criticisms. Handicap all round.

But the newspapers tried to play safe. They strove to be conservative and say just what would be expected of them. But conservatism consists in being just one generation behind ​the times. So, as regards the Winter Exhibition of the Academy of Design, the newspapers flung ink away on the conventional pictures because they thoroughly understood the terrain. They noticed merely the work of the impressionists, for that was now 'conservatively advanced.' As far as possible they ignored the neo- and post-impressionists because they didn't know what to say. As for cubism, it had them guessing.

However, in the Academy the cubists possessed a place, somewhat remote, off in a corner. But that corner was crowded with devotees of the new school, and the curious. People were beginning to feel an interest in the direction the artistic weather vane seemed to be pointing.

Amidst the cubists' pictures were three of Black Sadie from the brush of Chalmer Neale Truben. Only he hadn't the wit to name them for his model. The titles were high-blown things: 'Niger Woman,' so executed as to look like a checker-board badly mangled and crushed together. 'Study in Cubes,' really, for it looked like a brick chimney falling down. And 'Skull.' That was quite small. Square canvas. Black-and-white paint slabbed on ​with a trowel. 'Skull' defied the imagination of man. It resembled nothing whatsoever. Of that Chalmer was most proud. He declared it embodied 'pure mentality.' Fiddlesticks!

The Truben marvels the New York 'Times' pronounced to be incomprehensible. They insulted the human intelligence and the senses. Therefore they were immoral. The 'Herald' said they were 'suggestive,' but avoided saying of what. The New York 'American' described them as 'advanced.' That was quite coy of the 'American.' The Brooklyn papers were still more guarded.

At the heels of the big dailies yapped a horde of smaller magazines and papers, iconoclastic affairs bent on revolutionary propaganda. Neo-art. The pompous dailies, like a herd of elephants, paid no more attention to the smaller fry than if they had been a pack of little dogs.

The Countess Lasci also exhibited three pictures of Black Sadie. Also under fanciful titles. They were hung at a safe distance from the cubists' corner. 'Theme in Black and Red,' an idea easily digested. 'Esclave,' being a mere head-study in charcoal. And 'Sun Goddess.' Three pictures. The Academy felt ​bound to concede something to the Lasci. So 'Esclave' received 'Honorable Mention.' There was due praise in the papers, and smudgy pictures of the Countess.

But where was the First Prize?

In the middle room of the Exhibition, on a pedestal, stood a clay model about three feet high. Its title was 'Black Sadie.' She stood straight with head thrown back against the upraised hands, nude, pliant as an arrow, gazing at the stars, mysteriously searching heaven. The kinky hair bushed out in a savage mop.

This was the First Prize.

Who had wrought so exquisite a thing? Amelia Rogers.

Amelia Rogers had hoped to have her 'Black Sadie' accepted for the Exhibition. She had expected no 'mention,' much less prize. It had piqued her to do the thing. It had amused her to get the real Sadie. But she feared the Countess's displeasure as a consequence. It was unalloyed poaching. She did not dare go near the Exhibition.

The morning after the Exhibition opened, Amelia scrambled out of bed. On the landing outside her door lay the 'Times.' In the ​'Times' Amelia read that 'Black Sadie' had won First Prize. She had to go back to bed. Under the sheet and blankets she trembled, but not with the cold. She felt weak in her spine. She felt weak in her stomach. She refused to see the reporters when they came to the door.

As for Black Sadie, she read the news too. But she was not disturbed. The Countess had told her something done from her would be sure to win a prize. But why had the Countess's pictures failed? Why had not Chalmer Neale Truben's pictures got the prize? What was this Amelia had done? At that question Sadie remembered. She put on her hat and coat and went to find Amelia. Sadie was very angry. Amelia had stolen a march on her. She would never have posed for her if she had dreamed . . .

Sadie Ritchie naked in New York!

Hovering around Amelia's door were the reporters from the papers. Sadie was surrounded. Interviewed. Photographed. What an experience! She tore at the door demanding with tears to be let in. Was she going to be arrested?

At this precise moment the Countess Lasci ​arrived. The reporters melted from her path like frost before the sun. They disappeared. The Countess, jet ornaments, jade rings, white hair, and verbena scent, simultaneously entered Amelia Rogers's studio abode. She was radiant.

'My dear Amelia, . . . at last . . . I am overwhelmed . . . felicitations! Think of it . . . an unexpected masterpiece . . . inspiration! Black Sadie, the First Prize! You have salvaged my boast to New York!'

The Countess spied Sadie, hitherto overlooked in the gale of her entry.

'Sadie . . . treasure! Did I not say you would captivate New York! But from what an unexpected angle! Willie was right about you . . . his intuition . . . the theories of prismatic masses . . . solids . . . But whatever he says, I am now convinced that painting must forever be confined to expressing two-dimensional subjects . . . anything else needs a three-dimensional medium. Painting and sculpture! Twin arts.'

The Countess kissed Amelia. She kissed Sadie too. The impact of the impetuous salute carried Sadie off her feet. She sat down hard. Amelia began to get up. One fat bare leg ​swung to the floor. She gasped with astonishment. The Countess noticed none of these things. She paced excitedly to and fro.

'I am so happy,' she continued. 'I never really believed I had failed in you, Amelia. Now you have arrived . . . in one leap . . . and you have carried my latest enthusiasm with you. It is miraculous! I am convinced of the great latent possibilities in art through negro mediums. Poor Willie . . . he's a failure . . . but it's not my fault. He has run away . . . gone to Quebec for the winter sports.'

Amelia came out of the bed. She began to pick about among her scattered clothes. Sadie came to sufficiently to begin to brew a pot of coffee for her breakfast. The Countess began again.

'At break of dawn the newspaper men were at my door. I saw them all. The papers will be full of Black Sadie this afternoon. By-the-by, where are the reporters I passed on the landing? Haven't you had them in? Haven't you given out anything to the press?'

'I wasn't dressed,' protested Amelia. 'I couldn't let them in.'

'Never mind,' pursued the Countess. 'They'll be sure to come back. They always do. ​You can see them later. You must get into your clothes now. That is the first thing to do. My auto is downstairs. I am going to take you to the Exhibition, and Sadie too. Lunch at my house . . . a few notables and important people to meet you . . . the Prize Committee.'

What a turn of fortune for Amelia Rogers!

Black Sadie had nothing to say. Somehow she seemed to have scored a triumph. She was swept willy-nilly into the Countess's vortex of enthusiasm. Let her garner her laurels.

At the Exhibition everybody ran forward to meet the three women as they entered the galleries. A little impromptu reception was held at the feet of the statue of Black Sadie. Flowers were thrust into Amelia's hands. Flowers were bestowed on Black Sadie. The Countess embraced a bouquet too. Ushers ran up with telegrams on trays. Telegrams for the Countess. Telegrams for Amelia. Congratulations; invitations. And telegrams for Black Sadie. Offers of business . . . would she sign a label for a new perfume, African Rose? . . . would she allow her photograph to be used for some kind of harness oil? . . . would she give interviews to this and that concern and representative enterprise? . . . would she give to that ​and this charity? Offers of business. It was very confusing.

The moguls and bigwigs of the art schools were in the galleries. They were introduced. Collectors and connoisseurs were presented. The ring of bystanders thickened. Sadie saw Mrs. Fisher, and Miss Elsie Fisher, and Miss Rosie Fisher struggling to break through the palisades of people.

The French Ambassador arrived. Way was made for him to inspect the First Prize. He met the ladies. The Countess talked to him in French. She held court. The French Ambassador's wife interrupted to assume charge of the situation. She cried: 'Charmant!' and kissed Sadie on both cheeks. 'Charmant!' she chirruped, and kissed the Countess and Amelia too. 'Charmant!'

The Bishop of New York appeared. He made a little speech. He said the statue represented a closer understanding and friendship between the races. He said genius was a gift from God. And he piously voiced several other platitudes. They were received with respect by the bystanders. Exalted wisdom. Inspired predictions. The newspaper men wrote the Bishop's words in little notebooks. They took ​snapshots of the Bishop talking to Black Sadie, talking to the Countess, and talking to Amelia. Such versatility and wisdom appeared in picture and print in all the evening papers.

In the wake opened by the Bishop's withdrawal, the Fishers broke through to the center of the reception circle. They surrounded the Countess with family adulation. Exuberance. Compliments. They gazed raptly at Amelia because she sat on a throne of fame. She had 'arrived,' as Miss Elsie Fisher denominated success. On Sadie the Fishers bestowed a wealth of domestic news.

The Countess extracted her protégées from the pressing throng. They departed for lunch in the Colonial dining-room in the brownstone front near the new Grand Central Station.

It had been a very successful morning.

Black Sadie sat before the mirror in her room at Aunt Sally Bremmer's smearing a cream on her face. Madame Steel was close by overseeing the process. Madame Steel had given Sadie the unguent in a little porcelain pot. It was called 'Bloom.' There were testimonials and directions for use on the label . . . unexcelled for dark skins . . . apply liberally and rub into ​the pores with the tips of the fingers. The colored people's instinct for oil would have served Sadie better, for 'Bloom' made her look ghastly, purplish, livid. The pink finishing powder enhanced the gruesome effect. Sadie's face took on the unnatural luster of a badly done china-glaze. She herself was not altogether sure of the result, but Madame Steel praised it highly.

Since the notoriety Sadie had attained through Amelia's First Prize, the whole world sought Sadie's favor. But Madame Steel stood between the deceitful world and its would-be victim. She had quite adopted Black Sadie. Even the Countess, who also aspired to be patroness and protectress, could not oust the diva. She managed all Sadie's affairs, opened all her mail, and commented and advised according to her wisdom. It was deep. Sadie herself felt entirely bewildered. So many solicitations, contracts for this and that, plausible schemes for that and this. No end.

But the task of dealing with such a multitude of affairs and opportunities proved too weighty for even so substantial a person as Madame Steel. After a day or two of letters, callers, solicitors, who-not, what-not, she an​nounced to Sadie that her concerns must be entrusted to professional hands. She knew just the lawyer for the business. Mr. Harvey. His legal advice and protection were indispensable. He would administer Black Sadie's affairs. 'I cannot allow you to be rooked,' boomed Madame Steel. But why was she so solicitous?

She came herself to accompany Sadie to the office of the lawyer. She presided over the toilette proper for so important an occasion. Soon Sadie had completed the alteration of her complexion from black to blue, put on her ponyskin coat, and was ready to go with Madame Steel to interview the legal gentleman recommended by sundry reputable acquaintances of Harlem. The gentleman, by letter, promised the most exact services and honorable administration of all Sadie's public affairs, opportunities, and concerns. The Countess had made Amelia deliver herself into legal hands, and Amelia had wished Sadie to seek the protection of the same firm of barristers. But Harlem forbade. Madame Steel at that time had felt entirely competent to manage Sadie herself. Now that she was out of her depth, she made a point of employing a negro lawyer. Whites for the white, and blacks for ​the black. Thus Harlem. Racial loyalty. And Sadie acquiesced.

On the legal gentleman's desk was a card framed in a narrow mahogany frame. It said 'Keep Smiling.' The advice seemed the beginning of legal good counsel. It was meant for clients, evidently. It faced them. Behind it, on the other side of the desk, sat the barrister. He never smiled. A smile would have cracked his face. He rarely spoke; when he did, it was with the lips alone, for he kept his teeth fast clamped together. One of them was gold; the rest decayed yellow.

But Madame Steel talked a great deal. She stated Sadie's case explicitly. 'This dear innocent girl . . . sudden fame and importance . . . she must be protected with the whole strength of the law from the sharpers and shysters bent on destroying her interests and opportunities.' All the time the Madame talked, the lawyer listened, tapping the edge of his desk with a long blue pencil. No flicker of expression crossed his countenance. Sadie's either. She sat silent and composed as the Sphinx.

When Madame Steel had exhausted her tale, Mr. Harvey applied the point of his pencil to ​his golden tooth. He muttered a sentence or two, pushed a legal form across the desk, and thrust a pen into Sadie's hands. 'Contract. Sign on the dotted line.' 'Sign,' commanded Madame Steel. And Fate commanded 'Sign.' So Sadie signed the contract delivering into Mr. Harvey's keeping all her legal and business affairs.

Mr. Harvey scrutinized the contract, blotted it, and stood up. He was very tall and spare. He wore a cutaway coat and gray trousers. His shoes were highly polished, but not so highly as to conceal the transeptal bunions. On his little finger he wore the ring of some fraternal lodge. He passed his hand smoothly over his Poroed head, and then shook hands with Madame Steel and the new client. Madame Steel delivered up the accumulation of letters and circulars that belonged to Sadie. She smiled broadly, complacently. Mr. Harvey did not smile. He said: 'Come to-morrow at ten o'clock.' The interview was over. 'Keep Smiling' said the framed motto on the desk. 'Keep Smiling.'

Fame winged Amelia Rogers. She flopped helplessly. The Countess picked her up and ​put her in her game bag. She assumed charge of Amelia. As Madame Steel did for Sadie, so the Countess did for Amelia. She dominated her, for success had quite demoralized the poor soul. The Countess made Amelia put her affairs into legal hands. Her work was copyrighted.

Amelia was quite unstrung by excitement and notoriety. The Countess made her remove to her house in Park Avenue. 'The Village reeks of poverty and despair,' she said. 'Get out of it.' Amelia was glad to do so.

'All these letters from Constance,' said Amelia, shuffling a handful of missives. 'I am sure I don't know what to do about her. Of course I can't go on with that Jungle Book plan. Black Sadie wouldn't want to now. She didn't in the beginning.'

'Amelia, you are raving,' pronounced the Countess. 'Whatever are you talking about?'

'An eating-house,' said Amelia.

'Are you hungry?' asked the Countess.

'No; Constance,' answered Amelia.

Nothing to be got from that explanation. The Countess relapsed into her own letters. Amelia fingered the packet of Constance's correspondence, then dropped it into the waste-​basket. 'She'll have to carry on herself,' finished Amelia.

In point of fact Amelia and the Countess were sorting out their affairs before sailing for a little holiday in Europe. England; France. A brief trip during Lent. 'Amelia needs the rest and change badly,' said the Countess. 'She's quite unstrung by all the excitement of the past few weeks.' Amelia was. She did need the rest. She was glad to go.

So Amelia and the Countess sailed for Europe. Sadie came down to Pier 57 to see them off. Madame Steel and Florence Miller came too, and Bohemians . . . Corda Van Corda, Fellows, and others. The Countess stood on the deck in a mink coat and her hands full of red roses. Beside her Amelia in a new tailor-made suit that did not fit her anywhere. She flourished a three-pound box of Huyler's chocolates. The tugs nosed the liner out of her berth into the river, and the faces of those on the decks and those on the dock blurred out of recognition to one another. The waving and hallooing ended. Corda Van Corda invited the party to go to her apartment for tea and a cocktail. But Sadie said she had an engagement with the dressmaker which she must keep first. ​She would look in later and motor home with Madame Steel.

But Sadie had no dressmaker's engagement. She had planned to go to see Constance to settle with her privately about the Jungle Book. Like Amelia, she had received a snowstorm of letters from Constance on the subject of the change of scheme at the Cage of Lions. But Sadie had no intention of accepting Constance's proposals. Neither did she intend that Harvey should see the letters, for Constance wrote frankly about her pregnancy in terms of extraordinary impropriety. Curses mostly. She explained in detail just what she expected of Sadie as decoy for patronage to the Jungle Book. So the delicately constituted Sadie considered it better to settle the matter out of court.

She walked slowly down West Street. Two heavy currents of vehicular traffic poured past her in opposite directions. On the river-side stretched the almost unbroken line of docksheds and piers; on the other the frontage of miserable saloons, dives, squalid stores, stevedores' hang-outs, and warehouses. The afternoon was cold. The afternoon was fine. Sadie walked briskly.

She proceeded towards Christopher Street. ​At the corner of Twelfth Street her way was obstructed by a group of lounging negro toughs and a woman or two. Some grubby white children looked on from the curb. One of the colored boys manipulated an accordion, languidly, lyrically. One or two shuffled to the music, indolently, happily. The girls talked and joked in shrill voices. Sadie tried to skirt the crowd.

'Hi! My Gawd! Ef 'at ain't Sadie! How you, gal? Whar yer gwine?'

Lucy! Dud, street dud. Alley cat. Slut.

The accordion player stopped his music.

Marcus!

In an instant all Sadie's acquired polish and social veneer dropped from her. Jungle blood burned in her veins. Her savage ancestry claimed her. Here stood her enemy. Marcus! the man who had tricked her and robbed her. She pushed her way into the group.

'You'se Marcus! You low-lifed nigger man. Thief!'

Lucy intruded.

'He ain't no Marcus!' she howled. 'Is yer, Cephas?'

The other boys laughed. Marcus? Cephas! Cephas Hook.

​But Black Sadie felt sure of her man. Her tongue was loosed as never before. She lit into him with vocal fury. She lit into Lucy too. Every vestige of civilization disappeared from her manner and her speech. Aunt Nancy or Quecene would have known their own. Daughter of Ella, nigger wench, and the gallows-bird, Lightfoot Mose. But Cephas listened idly to the tirade. Words meant nothing to him. The others drank in the situation delightedly. It was a good joke. Welcome diversion, a genuine fight, furious cat before a hound dog.

After a while Cephas broke in. He winked first at his audience. 'Lis'en, honey-bunch. You'se got de wrong number. 'Deed, my name is Cephas. I ain't never seed you befo'. I don' know nuthin' 'bout no Marcus-ses. You speaks mighty pretty, but when I'm roused I'm roused. You better lay yo' lip offen me.' Thus Cephas.

But it was Marcus. Sadie was sure of that. She broke into a fresh tirade. Such invective. So vindictive. Furious African female. Unconcernedly Marcus began to play his accordion again. He kept one eye on Sadie. Would nothing move him? Never before had such anger shaken Sadie. It possessed her.

Marcus (or Cephas) spoke again. 'Dis here ​sweet gal,' he said. 'Don' she love me, tho'? I thinking I better take her long home wid me.' He slung his accordion over his shoulder and moved on Sadie. The boys laughed afresh. Sadie broke away. Fear replaced anger.

Lucy followed her down the street. 'Sadie, gimme er little change. I ain't had nuthin' ter eat fer two days.'

Indeed, she looked it. She had lost her old sprightliness. She had come down in the world. Ruined. But Sadie was furious with Lucy. If it had not been for Lucy she would never have met Marcus. And she had been cruelly wronged by Marcus . . . tricked . . . doped and robbed. Sadie robbed! The 'doggone nasty sneaking yaller hound, bo' pig!' She fled on her way. She left Lucy calling after her. Lucy lifted her strident voice and cursed her roundly.

For some blocks Sadie walked blindly, furiously. Cheated! No revenge for wrong but just her 'lip.' Helpless.

But she came at last to Christopher Street. She sought out the Cage of Lions. But the Cage of Lions was closed. On the door a board was nailed. 'Sold.'

In the apartment of Corda Van Corda tea-​cups, plates, and cocktail glasses littered the place. Late afternoon. The guests were gone. Black Sadie had not appeared. Corda Van Corda and Fellows lounged before a dying fire. Empty glasses; smoking cigarette stubs.

'Well, I'm glad the niggers are gone!' said Fellows. 'I feel like washing my hands.'

'They contribute a certain élan to life,' yawned Corda.

'Neurotic!'

'Did you say exotic?'

'No; neurotic. It's depravity . . . whites and niggers.'

'I don't agree with you. One must be amused.'

Silence.

'Poor old Countess,' lisped Corda. 'She's gone. It's a blessing. I hope she's seasick by now.'

'Cat! But I concur. Amelia's the only one who has had the initiative to try to slip her leash.'

'She didn't succeed. The Lasci turned the tables on her.'

'The old darling had to,' said Fellows. 'It was her one chance. Failure and opportunity in the air. She was lucky to catch the latter on ​the drop. She knows she's been slipping for some time. Is she hardening with age, or is her particular brand of sophistication going out of style? She can't keep up. New York's too fast. The old girl knows it too. But the "Black Sadie" First Prize has put her on her feet again.'

'Right! . . . Have another cocktail?'

'No, thanks. The ice has watered it down.'

Corda put her hands behind her head. She propped her feet on a high cushion. She yawned repeatedly. Fellows thrust a cigarette into her mouth, lighting it for her.

'Will you stop yawning?' he exclaimed. 'Still, in a way,' he went on, 'the Countess has accomplished a great deal this winter. Her nigger hobby has quite caught on. People are taking it up. It's the thing to "see Harlem." It used to be the Tenderloin. But it's quite different, this. There's money in it.'

'Think so?' answered Corda. 'The Countess has spent a lot. What has she made out of it?'

'Exhilaration. That's enough for her. But Amelia got the Prize. That proved the Lasci's thesis. She felt vindicated.'

Corda did not reply. She tried to blow ​smoke-rings over the knob of a chair post. The rings broke. They would not hang on. But Corda kept trying. The bracelets and bangles on her arm rattled every time she put her cigarette to her mouth or took it away.

'Amelia will make something of her success. I hear she is deluged with orders for casts and new studies. I tried to poach on the Countess myself, but couldn't pull it off.'

Corda still said nothing. She shut one eye to peer through a smoke-ring above her head. Fellows went on.

'But I've a better idea now. I'm perfecting a scheme. I believe Black Sadie can be made use of.'

'What's your scheme?'

'Well, everybody knows about her. She's a fad just now. With the Countess out of the way and unable to interfere, I believe we can use Black Sadie very profitably.'

'Why do you say "We"?'

'I want you to come in with me. You can finance the scheme.'

'I'm not in the least interested,' said Corda. 'Give me another Fatima.'

'You haven't heard me yet,' continued Fellows. 'It's really a capital idea I have. But I ​have no money. You have. Let us pool intellect and dollars.'

'You're insulting,' laughed Corda. 'But reveal your secret self. What's your idea? Let's have your plan.'

'Just this: a cabaret. The Black Sadie . . . ultra-smart . . . and ultra-expensive, of course. Isn't it great!'

Corda cocked an ear. She began to be interested. Fellows enlarged on his plan.

'It will checkmate the Countess,' he ended.

'That's the best argument you have,' cried Corda. 'Done! But how'll we catch the bird?'

The 'bird' at that moment fluttered at the door. Sadie was received cordially. No; she wouldn't have tea. She wouldn't stay. Since Madame Steel had gone, she must hurry home. She had an engagement to open a large charity bazaar for the new negro health center in Harlem.

The next day Fellows and Corda Van Corda called on Harvey.

'Keep Smiling,' said the motto on his desk.

A week later Sadie found herself signing a contract as 'headliner' for The Black Sadie Cabaret in 109th Street, near Broadway.

The Black Sadie Cabaret.

​Undertaker Raggs gave a party on the eve of his departure for the stage. He essayed to weld in a social way the diverse elements of his professional clientèle. Guests from Haiti, Trinidad, Jamaica, and a few native-born American negroes. He invited Sadie to the party, and he invited Professor Felton. He would have liked to have Madame Steel too, but, as she had snubbed him so often, he dared not risk asking her to come.

Madame Steel would have liked an invitation just so that she might have snubbed the mortician again. It angered her to be deprived of the chance. It was lesser consolation to criticize the affair. She sniffed in a superior fashion. She told Sadie she had no desire to attend such gatherings as an undertaker's dance. She hoped Sadie would decline the invitation. It would serve the impudent oaf just right. But Black Sadie said nothing. She never argued with Madame Steel. However, she went to the party.

Back of the undertaker's office was the 'show room,' a long apartment where the stock of coffins and caskets was kept. The show room had no ventilation and little light. True, there were several small square windows high up on ​the wall near the ceiling. They did not open. The glass was darkest red and green. A porcelain 'dome' screwed to the ceiling and operated by a hanging cord emitted a flood of electric light.

For the occasion of the dance, the stock was moved into a room still farther back. It was not a large space, so the coffins and caskets had to be piled one on top of another. Their suggestive ends could be plainly seen through an open archway. The dangling bead portières barely separated the two apartments.

But no matter. The company did not mind. The number of guests was not great, not more than two score, but the 'show room' was jammed with dancers. They danced to the music of a grafonola. Slow moving.

Mr. Raggs was very affable. He delighted himself with his party. He saw that the different groups did not mix well, so he tried to talk and dance with everybody. He even tried to entertain the professor who sat in a morris chair out in the hallway. The professor quite shared Madame Steel's prejudices, but for the sake of his conservatory he condescended to attend his pupil's party.

Every now and then Raggs got himself with ​Sadie. They danced together. His maneuver was to get her into the privacy of the room beyond the bead portières and there press his suit afresh. He did so several times. But Sadie as often refused him. No arguments prevailed with her. Raggs sighed and returned to the company.

The party was not a great success. It came to an end quite early, before midnight. Mr. Raggs wrote on one of his professional cards, 'No hard feelings, I hope? The offer is always open to you.' He leaned out of his second-story window and slipped the card under the sash of the window of the room where Sadie dwelt.

Black Sadie did not reply to the card.

'Keep Smiling.'

Lawyer Harvey sat at his desk grimmer than ever. He received two visitors. They came in reference to Black Sadie. They were not in very good tempers, for they considered themselves deprived of rightful gains by the client of Lawyer Harvey.

The first comer was a blondined young woman. 'Miss Constance Fisher.' She explained how Sadie had wronged her in the affair of the Jungle Book . . . deserted her after ​she had spent a large sum of money on the scheme. She sought redress. The lawyer asked to see the contract which Sadie and Constance had signed. But there was no signed contract. Ah! So neither tears, lamentations, nor threats got another word from Mr. Harvey. 'Miss' Constance Fisher departed in anger that verged on despair.

The second visitor was a provocative Hebrew. His card read: 'Isaac Sacks: Producer.' He likewise asserted a lien on Black Sadie. Again there was no evidential contract.

Hard lines, but so.

The lawyer sat in stony silence until Mr. Sacks had exhausted himself. Then he opened the door for him. 'You black shyster, I'll see what the law can do for you!' And he departed. Mr. Harvey closed the door.

Firm hands. Mr. Harvey handled business well.

'Keep Smiling.'

New York is easily pleased if the pleasure is expensive. The Black Sadie Cabaret was very expensive. So by all odds it was a great success. From midnight till sunrise the tables were crowded.

​Corda Van Corda had invested largely in money. Mr. Fellows was equally lavish in ideas. Excellent combination. The cabaret was large. It was round. The walls were hung with black velvet asparkle with sequins. Thirty tables in two concentric circles, and in the center a polished dance-floor. No limit to the dancing. The entire ceiling was iridescent glass through which light poured. Food aplenty. Wine aplenty. The Black Sadie Cabaret, 109th Street, near Broadway.

From time to time professional dancers and entertainers came into the dancing oval. First-class performances. But the real pièce de résistance was Black Sadie. When she appeared, the patrons of the cabaret excelled themselves in enthusiasm and applause. It was the thing to do. They did it. Follow the crowd in the latest fad. Black Sadie.

A tiny embossed figure of Black Sadie as the First Prize decorated each menu card and programme. The orchestra invented a way of playing fox-trots which they called 'Black Sadie.' One particular tune was called 'The Black Sadie.' When the guitars and saxophones gave out that peculiar wailing motif, the velvet curtains were drawn aside and Black ​Sadie herself appeared. It was the thing for everybody to stand up and clap at her entrance. She was the headliner of the entertainment.

Black Sadie had a number of costumes, all elaborate, bizarre, expensive. One was of shimmering green silk with a wide loose belt of imitation pearls and a high headdress of heron's feathers, a heron feather fan. 'The River Nile.' Another costume was red and blue silk put together in curious geometric patterns, on her head a cap of amethysts, and her long thick hair sticking out in a brush straight away behind. On the programme this was called 'Night.' And she wore also upon occasion a floating mass of white tulle and lace built over a great cage, a wire frame, and an enormous white lace hat with sweeping aigrettes on the brim. Fellows named this get-up 'Mist with Thunder-Heart.'

In such magnificent clothes Black Sadie would appear. Headliner. When she reached the center of the dance-floor, the music would sob down to a low rhythm. Black Sadie would pause. Suspense. Everybody watched with bated breath. Then she would begin to move, very slowly, thighs, shoulders, or slightly bend ​the knees in time with the music. Her voice sometimes caught up the melody from the violin or saxophone, the strings brushing underneath like a strong flow of water.

Sadie's act was esteemed superior to all the others. It was considered a marvel of lyrical perfection. But it was really nothing, no professional technic, only emphasis. However . . . the patrons of the cabaret considered it wonderful. And the management meant them to do so. If the music beat faster, Black Sadie moved faster; if slower, slower. At the end she would go upon the orchestra stage, displace the drummer, and carry on the rhythm without losing a beat.

She invented a number of curious things to do at this climax . . . swishing sandpaper together, beating a silver triangle, tapping cymbals, brushing the drumhead with a fly-swatter, jingling little bells, whacking a board. Her small black hands flew agilely from one thing to another, doing so many things quickly. The orchestra boys called it 'jazzing' the music. Black Sadie would make her exit in a wild clamor of sound.

It was clever, the management of Black Sadie's performance. She never appeared ​oftener than once a night. Sometimes only three or four times a week. It was uncertain. Piquant parsimony. It made good lure for patronage. The appearances of Black Sadie were precious to the public. One never knew if she would come or not. Take a chance at the Black Sadie Cabaret.

Sometimes, instead of ending her act by playing the 'traps,' Sadie moved about among the tables. She autographed menu cards. The happy, lucky patrons took the cards home as great prizes. Black Sadie's cards. People are easy to please, but the pleasure must seem elusive, just at the tips of the fingers, desirable. Good business.

The cabaret grew in popularity. The prices rose sky-high. It was difficult to get reservations for supper at the Black Sadie. They had to be taken days ahead of time. Money poured in. Sadie had never dreamed of so much money in all her life. Piles of money. Black Sadie received a tenth of the profits. The amount was larger every week.

Sadie was glad Mr. Harvey had forced her to sign the cabaret contract. She had not wanted to do so. For herself she really had wanted to accept Mr. Isaac Sacks's proposi​tion. She longed to go on the stage, like Florence Miller, like Mr. Raggs. But the lawyer had insisted that the cabaret was the better opportunity. He did not tell her that Fellows and Corda Van Corda had already made it worth his while to take that stand. A handsome check. Perquisites for Harvey. He promised Black Sadie to the cabaret.

Professionals rehearsed Sadie for her 'acts.' Professionals made her up. Fellows wanted her to do one number that would recall the First Prize. Nude. But Sadie could not go so far. She refused. It would take more time to train her for that. As a compromise she was persuaded to do a new dance called the hula-hula. It was just imported from Hawaii. It split the difference between the nude and something else. She learned it because she felt protected by her costume of imitation grass and palm leaves, a lei around her neck, lei on arms and ankles. The hula-hula gave the spectators a thrill. Enthusiasm.

Black Sadie made more money than she had ever dreamed possible. She bought whatever her heart desired. Many things. She loved fine clothes best of all. Her dressmakers created 'modes' for her. She learned to do without a ​corset. Near to the cabaret she had a handsome apartment. Sometimes she stayed there. But she really lived in Aunt Sally Bremmer's boarding-house. A comfortable secret dwelling. At the apartment she entertained, and there she kept her wardrobe.

Since the rise of Sadie's sun, even Harlem seemed beneath her. She rarely saw Madame Steel and her superior milieu of 'Island' gentry. Professor Felton never. Once she went to the Follies to see Raggs dance. She had a box. As she entered, people in all parts of the house craned their necks and nudged one another. They said: 'There's Black Sadie.'

Raggs sent for her to come back-stage. She met some of the outstanding members of the troupe. The 'big boss' himself asked her if he could make room for her in next year's bill. The Follies . . . a special number to herself. Black Sadie!

The tide of success lifted Sadie on its spacious bosom. She rode easily, no striving either way. Life carried her. Fate was kind. Fortune, unexpected, unsought, crowned her. Sadie herself was always passive. Other people handled her. Other people managed her concerns. Always so. First it had been Quecene ​. . . going 'North,' service, big wages; then Peter took her to live with him. And the Countess carried her to New York, into another life and world. Amelia deflected her way by subterfuge, trickery. Very fortunately so, now. Lastly, Harvey and Corda Van Corda and Fellows had her. The Black Sadie Cabaret. Upward progress, steps . . . Ritchie pickaninny, seamstress, maid . . . model, First Prize, headliner, star. Black Sadie!

April. Rain, sunshine; sunshine, rain. Black Sadie had flower boxes on the window-ledges of her apartment. The janitor took out the stiff evergreens. He put in hyacinths and tulips. The hyacinths were white, the tulips dark, purplish. The florists called them 'Black Sadies.'

One afternoon Corda Van Corda came to Sadie's apartment. She had had a cablegram from the Countess Lasci. It was in her handbag. She extracted the yellow paper for Sadie to see it. The Countess said she and Amelia had taken passage on a large liner and might be expected in America before the end of the month.

Corda also had a rope of black pearls to show ​Sadie. They also were in her handbag. Loose, no case. 'Beauties!' said Corda, dangling the string of pearls. 'From Tiffany. I am beginning to get some returns on my investment in the cabaret.' Sadie looked at the pearls. Corda slipped them back into the silken confusion of her reticule. It lay on the table.

Sadie showed Corda her flower boxes. There were some new gowns too for Corda to see. Corda particularly liked the cloth-of-silver evening wrap. Stunning! She tried it on.

'Go into the next room and look at yourself in the long mirror,' said Sadie.

Corda went. She was not out of the room two minutes. The door between the two rooms was open. Yet in that interval of time, Sadie had the rope of pearls. She thrust them into the earth of the flower boxes, deep down among the tulip bulbs. And very quickly she tore a small place in the hem of the handbag.

Corda liked the cloth-of-silver wrap. She liked the red feather fan too. Then she departed. Sadie saw her from the window get into her own car and drive herself away.

An hour later, Corda Van Corda called Sadie on the telephone. 'Sadie, my pearls. They're gone. There's a rent in my bag. Could ​they by any chance have dropped out in your apartment? Please look carefully. Have the janitor look in the halls and on the pavement.'

No pearls.

Sadie buried the treasure deeper in the earth of the tulip boxes. After all Corda might get suspicious. The apartment might have to be searched.

True to type. Lifelong habit. In Sadie's blood. Klep.

The next week Corda Van Corda asked Sadie to meet her after a matinée at the opera. Five o'clock at the main entrance on Broadway. They would go together to a music place in Forty-Fourth Street to try out a new 'traps man' for the orchestra at the Black Sadie.

When Sadie reached the Opera House, it was already five o'clock, but the matinée was not yet over. Sadie walked down Broadway. Quite cold for April. A cup of hot coffee would be nice. Sadie turned into a lunch-room.

'A cup of coffee, please.'

'One coffee!'

The clatter and bang of a popular restaurant. The strident voices of the waiting-girls howling their orders through the serving-window. ​Some one dropped a tray loaded with crockery. Smash! Sadie heard the unlucky waitress moan aloud. The manager appeared. His voice was very angry. Sadie heard the girl crying. Protests, explanations; no good.

'You're fired! See? This is the third time to-day. You're fired!'

The girl collapsed at the next table to Sadie. Broken spirit. Weeping. Sadie turned to look at her.

Constance!

Black Sadie opened her bag. Inside was stuffed a roll of bills. She extracted the lot. As she passed Constance, going out, she thrust the money under her hands. Then she scurried for the door. Outside on the pavement, she glanced furtively back. Against the blurred glass of the restaurant door was pressed the white, tear-stained face of Constance. But it was radiant through the tears.

Black Sadie was soon lost in the crowd. She felt ever so happy.

Poor Constance!

Late afternoon at Aunt Sally Bremmer's. In the kitchen Aunt Sally sat on a borax box with her feet in a tin pan of hot water. Leisure ​hour between dinner and supper. She was preparing for church in the evening. Sadie sat at the table sipping a cup of very hot tea. She was just out of bed from her day's rest.

'Misery in mer foots,' remarked Aunt Sally, tucking her dress higher. 'I can't hardly walk none 'less I heats um furst. I gotter go ter church ter-night.'

Sadie refilled her cup from a pot on the stove. Boiled tea, very strong. A single ray of sunshine shot through the chink of the back door. It lay yellow-red across the good-natured face of Aunt Sally.

''Deed 'tis er wicked worl',' commented the old negress, enlarging on some secret moral process in her mind. 'Folks sho' needs religion. Dey needs hit strong . . . . Hit's er perishing worl', and 'tis few will "enter in."'

'I "come through" when I wuz fifteen,' said Sadie piously. Was it necessary to justify herself?

Aunt Sally paid no attention to her remark. She lifted first one foot, then the other, clear of the steaming water, shook them vigorously, and glanced at the horny toes. Then she replaced them in the foot-bath.

'Dere's jedgment er-comin',' she continued. ​'O Lordy, Lordy, save po' sinners at de golden bar. Ah, Lord!'

Aunt Sally muttered between speech and song, half talking, half crooning a religious melody. Everlasting comfort of the negro heart, solace of the soul, music, religion.

The buzzer above the door fluttered frantically.

'Dem damned kids ringin' my bell ergin,' expostulated Aunt Sally.

The buzzer sputtered again.

The door burst open. A little colored girl ran in. In her hand she carried a yellow envelope.

'Telegram fer Miss Sadie!'

Telegram from Corda Van Corda: 'Titanic wrecked at sea. Countess Lasci and Amelia Rogers lost.'

Black Sadie thrust the telegram into the red fire of the range.

Corda Van Corda put on black for the Countess. Mourning is often very becoming to fair women. Corda thought so. Sadie did not exhibit grief for the Countess or Amelia in her clothes, but she accompanied Corda Van Corda to memorial meetings and services held in va​rious halls and churches of the city for the victims of the Titanic disaster. Mr. Fellows sometimes went too. He preferred the gatherings where survivors described their experiences . . . how the ship struck the iceberg . . . how people in the icy ocean got hauled aboard the lifeboats, while others drowned . . . how steamers came to the rescue.

Corda supplied herself with new handkerchiefs, all with mourning borders. She carried several at a time about her person because she always cried so lavishly. In tender tribute to the Countess she soaked her handkerchiefs in verbena scent. She hated the odor of verbena, but for the dear Countess . . .

The tragic end of Amelia Rogers made her First Prize seem deeply romantic. Its fame trebled. The little statue was cast in bronze and set up in the principal foyer of the New York Public Library. A wreath tied with crêpe lay at its feet. Crowds of people flocked to see the Black Sadie First Prize cast. And the model shared in the public interest, or was it curiosity? The Black Sadie Cabaret was jammed every night, long before midnight, long after sunrise. The people came to see Black Sadie.

​The drummer in the cabaret orchestra had become a 'traps man.' The number of instruments, traps, increased around his stool. He knew just when to hand Sadie his drumstick and leap out of the way for her to end her act with 'jazz.' Sadie liked the man. She was sorry when he had to leave the orchestra. Because of a barking cough. He couldn't break it. It ruined the music. The management wouldn't stand for it. The 'traps man' had to leave.

It was hard to replace him. 'Traps' was a new stunt in orchestra playing. Its many possibilities had not at that time been developed and brought into vogue. Corda Van Corda and Sadie tried to find some one who would do. They visited numerous musical establishments looking for just that sort of drummer. But even Sixth Avenue failed to gestate a 'traps man' for the Black Sadie Cabaret. Professor Felton was appealed to in the very beginning. No assistance. He scorned the idea of fly-swatters and sandpaper music. His conservatory was strictly 'classic.'

The situation grew serious. The manager, the owners, and the 'headliner' alike could not produce a new 'traps man.' One night the saxophone man, whose body was small as a boy's ​and whose face was like a very old monkey's, told the manager that he had found some one for the place. His name was Lazy Tiger, alias Altemus Tweed, or the other way around, and he now waited belowstairs to be interviewed and tried.

The manager had up the Lazy Tiger. He tried him out. For 'traps' he seemed created. With eyes almost shut, body swaying, he handled the traps like lightning, marvelously. The manager was delighted. Lazy Tiger was employed on the spot. He went into the boys' dressing-room to put on the olive-green silk uniform. The suit given him was a close fit, but his magnificent physique appeared to all the better advantage. The muscles of his arms and legs . . . in the green silk sleeves and pants . . . 'Watch out, girls!' exclaimed the manager.

Sadie heard that a new man had been found when she came to the cabaret later in the evening. She was glad of that. She was tired of the straight drum-beating, which the substitute drummer had done, and she was tired of the dances and the autographing she had had to do because there were no traps. To-night she would go back to the hula-hula and at the high ​moment spring at the traps. She sent word to the Lazy Tiger to be ready for her.

But what was Sadie's surprise, when she came into the dancing oval, to see that Altemus Tweed, alias the Lazy Tiger, or the other way around, was no other than Marcus or Cephas Hook. The impudent fellow winked knowingly at her over the tops of his cymbals and drums. Sadie was highly incensed. She put both spite and chagrin into her hula-hula. Lazy Tiger played up to her every inch. When she seized the traps herself, he sprang onto the floor and did the hula-hula with the utmost abandon and vigor.

The applause drowned the loud banging Sadie gave the big drum.

She was furious. But everybody else was highly pleased. They demanded that the boy and girl do the dance together. And they did. Both antagonistic. Hatred. It was a savage dance.

The manager was sure he had found a prize in the Lazy Tiger.

But Black Sadie did not come to the cabaret for two nights. She hid herself at Aunt Sally's and would not come out. Sulks. 'But dey ain't no nigger man goin' ter down dis chile!' she ​assured herself with determination. It was natural for Sadie to drop into dialect. Nigger!

During Sadie's self-imposed absence from the cabaret she solaced her soul in Aunt Sally's company. She spent much time in the kitchen of the boarding-house. She told Aunt Sally how she hated men, particularly 'yaller buck coons.' 'Ah, Lord!' agreed Aunt Sally.

Warm days now. May. The back door of the kitchen stood open. Life appeared in the alley. Intimate, neighborhood affairs in the alley. But the neighborhood missed the stimulation of the Establishment Raggs. Raggs's place was for sale. Doors and windows closed. The black wagons no longer drove up to the mortician's back door to discharge the long covered hampers. Stiffs. It was a sad lack to local entertainment.

One Saturday afternoon Sadie sat with Aunt Sally in the kitchen door. Fowls with their necks wrung lay on the floor. Sadie plucked them. Aunt Sally 'jerked' the carcasses. When the handfuls of feathers tore out, there was a soft ripping sound most familiar in Sadie's ear. Sadie thought of the Fishers' kitchen and of home in Virginia.

​She began to talk. She told Aunt Sally about Ole Miss, about Aunt Nancy and Aunt Thorry, about the chickens, so many of them, enough for all, at the big house. She remembered the time the angry dominica hen flew up in her face, when she was a little girl. The pressed hen's-wing fan was at home now, in the battered tin trunk that had been Quecene's . . . under Aunt Thorry's bed.

Very pleasant in the May sunshine picking chickens, talking, remembering happy days at home. Across the way two neighbors chatted, laughing. Together they exposed the shortcomings of their husbands. Some little children came and stood below the stoop to watch the plucking of the fowls. One of the little boys purloined a long piece of entrail from the waste-bucket at Aunt Sally's feet. Dangling it, he threatened the little girls. They ran about screaming.

'Fetch dem guts back here!' commanded Aunt Sally, irately. 'You stop flingin' dem chicken guts around!'

But the children ran away. Out of the alley. Gone. Screaming.

Aunt Sally subsided. 'Ah, Lord, chillun,' she grumbled.

​Very quiet in the alley. The shadows lengthened. Aunt Sally tumbled the pieces of cut chicken into a pan of salt water. 'Fried chicken,' murmured Aunt Sally to herself. Fried chicken for Sunday dinner in the boarding-house.

Over the roofs from the street came the noise of a row. Many voices. Curses. Then screams. More curses. The sound of a great commotion.

A man came pounding down the alley, running for his life. At the moment all the doors were shut save Aunt Sally's. Not a place to hide. But the man saw the one open door. In he came, slamming it behind him.

'Oh, my Gawd, lady, won't yer please hide me?'

Aunt Sally gave a cry. 'Who you?'

Sadie seized the poker. Noise of footsteps running in the alley.

'Oh, my Gawd! Oh, my Gawd!'

Sadie sensed something familiar in the tone of that voice. She looked into the fellow's face.

Lucky Andrew!

'Ef dey finds me here, dey'll arrest you too,' panted the fugitive.

​That frightened the women!

'Lord have mussy!' wailed Aunt Sally.

'Man, how you come here? What you done done?' Thus Sadie.

'Ah, Lord! Sadie, hide me! Do please hide me!' Andrew recognized Sadie. He went down on his knees. 'I done cut up er guy . . . fair fight . . . He drawed er knife on me.'

'Dis yo' man?' asked Aunt Sally of Sadie.

'He's my brother,' answered Sadie. 'Kin we hide him till dark?'

In a trice Aunt Sally dragged aside the piece of oilcloth on the floor by the table. Underneath was a trapdoor to a cellar. Aunt Sally jerked up the trap. 'Git in dar quick!' she cried.

Lucky Andrew!

Aunt Sally flung open the kitchen door. She bounced busily about the stove. 'Ef I could I sho'ly would stan' on de rock whar Moses stood,' she sang aloud. Sadie swept the floor.

Police and a crowd in the alley. 'Lady, did a man run by here?'

'Man!' queried Aunt Sally, surprise in her tone. 'One mought er run past,' she conceded. 'I don' pay no 'tention ter folks runnin' up an' ​down dis here alley. What kind er man is you-all lookin' fer? What he done do?'

The policeman snorted. Nothing to be got here. On the pursuers went. Aunt Sally poked the fire. Sadie swept the chicken feathers off the floor. Utter innocence.

At dark Lucky Andrew was brought up from the cellar. The same old Lucky Andrew. He did not seem to Sadie much older in appearance than he had when he left home years ago. Down one cheek there was a shadow. Was it a scar or a fold in the skin?

Sadie dressed herself and went out to do some shopping. She went all the way to New York, away down on Seventh Avenue. When she came back, she had a complete change of clothes for Andrew.

Lucky Andrew! Nobody ever suspected he had killed a man in a Harlem street. He became a boarder at Aunt Sally Bremmer's. Sadie got him a job for 'rough work' at the cabaret; ashes, garbage. Lucky Andrew! Blood is thicker than water. Nigger blood. Ritchie blood. Kin, Andrew and Black Sadie. He called her 'Miss Sadie' and was always very deferential.

​Black Sadie received a really pathetic letter from Miss Elsie Fisher '. . . because you were dear Aunt Roberta's friend.' The Fishers were having hard times. Miss Elsie Fisher naively wrote Sadie the private affairs of the family. Mrs. Fisher, senior, was dead. Six weeks ago. She had had a stroke. 'Papa' felt the disgrace of Timothy's divorce so keenly that he had made Timothy leave East Orange. Rob had 'got in trouble' and had gone to Canada. Herb was working with 'Papa.' The shock of 'dear Aunt' Roberta's tragic end had aged Mamma.' Now, 'Grandma Perkins' was dead. 'Yesterday afternoon she fell asleep in her chair and never woke up. But she had been ailing for days. She kept asking for you. Mamma wants to know if you will come to the funeral. We all would like to see you.'

Sadie was truly sorry for the Fishers. She would certainly go to East Orange for Mrs. Perkins's funeral. She ordered a wreath of Black Sadie tulips from a Fifth Avenue florist. 'Black Sadie' she wrote on her card. The florist's eyes nearly popped out of his head to think that he was actually talking with the real Black Sadie, truly selling that famous person a wreath of tulips.

​Sadie went to Hoboken on the Hudson Tube. Then she went to East Orange by the D. L. & W. At the Brick Church station she left the train and walked through the near-by streets to Park Avenue. Very familiar ground. Late May. The elms and bits of lawns were very green. The caladiums and geraniums grew plentifully around the front-porch steps of all the homes. East Orange.

The shades were drawn in the Fishers' house. Yet there was a sense of somber activity about the place. A line of gloomy motors, hearse and cars, lined the street. A man in a frock coat stood at the front door. Even the iron deer seemed downcast in mien.

Sadie turned in at the gate. In the hall Herb met her. ''Lo, Sadie,' he said. Most of the furniture was moved aside, hall, living-room, and dining-room too. It was amply supplemented by folding chairs. In the living-room alcove, where the cascading fern usually stood on its terra-cotta pedestal, was a wheeled affair on which undertakers rest caskets. Flowers, wreaths and designs, lay about it on the floor.

Herb and Sadie went into the pantry. Easier to talk there on old-time footing. Herb ​had grown. His fingers were badly stained with nicotine. His breath was vile. Halitosis.

'They're getting ready to bring her down now,' said Herb. 'The minister's upstairs with Mamma. He'll come down soon. Then you can go up. I know Mamma wants to see you.'

Miss Rosie Fisher tumbled down the back stairs in a flood of tears. She wept on Sadie's bosom. Down the front stairs came the coffin.

Death and other misfortunes in the family quite unnerved the Fishers. Tears stood in Mr. Fisher's eyes when he grasped Sadie's hand. Mrs. Fisher wept aloud.

'Now, Mamma, don't do that,' protested Miss Elsie Fisher. 'You won't be able to go through with it if you cry.' 'It' being the funeral ceremony. Mrs. Fisher wept afresh at the rebuke from her daughter.

Sadie sat near the pantry door 'during the exercises.' The rooms were full. People whispered: 'There's Black Sadie! She used to be help here.' She saw that her wreath of tulips lay conspicuously at the foot of the casket.

When the Presbyterian minister had finished his duties, the people filed past the open casket 'to take leave.' Old Mrs. Perkins looked as placid as a boiled dumpling lying tucked in her ​casket. She wore a gray silk dress. The yoke and the cuffs were shirred. Poor old lady! Sadie felt really sad and soft-hearted looking at the white, dead face . . . And all the kindness of the Fishers, old friends in East Orange.

When she got back to New York, it was time to go to the cabaret. Sadie had enjoyed her trip to the funeral. It started so many memories . . . old times in service . . . the big wooden tenement in Orange Street, Newark . . . and the Star Church . . . good times . . . Peter and the rooms where they lived in Harrison. Sadie really meditated on all these things. She was not wholly without a heart.

In June the estate of the Countess Lasci was sold, the house in Park Avenue and all it contained. Many other brownstone fronts in that neighborhood were also falling under the hammer. The district bade fair to grow up into skyscraping apartment-hotels.

Sadie bought the 'Honorable Mention' of herself. The high sum she paid appalled her. No wonder she was famous. Why, in Seventh and Sixth Avenues most lovely pictures of fashionable ladies, beautiful scenery, or religious subjects could be purchased for one ​twentieth and less for what she had to pay for 'Esclave.' Honorable Mention, merely a head.

Sadie hung the picture in her apartment, not at Aunt Sally's. Aunt Sally would have esteemed it 'trash' . . . just some charcoal lines. Sadie looked at the picture a great deal. What made it so expensive? Could that really be she? Did she have a head like that? Funny!

Corda Van Corda and Mr. Fellows had a disagreement over the new traps man. Corda was 'crazy' about him. She wanted to open a new cabaret where she could feature the Lazy Tiger. Fellows objected. He held her to the terms of the Black Sadie Cabaret contract. Corda pouted. She liked to have her way.

Corda Van Corda 'had fallen' for the Lazy Tiger. She gave parties for him at her apartment. She made him drive with her in her car. The Lazy Tiger felt uncomfortable with the 'white ooman.' She mystified him.

'Mistake, old girl,' remonstrated Fellows. 'Don't try to civilize the niggers. Use 'em.'

'I intend to,' snapped Corda.

'Pervert!'

'I suspect you of being stupid,' said Corda.

Fellows banged out of the room. Corda's angry laughter followed him. She smoked one ​cigarette after another, stamping angrily about the place. Then she called up the Lazy Tiger on the telephone. They dined together in a chop suey restaurant in the Bronx.

Sadie hated Marcus more and more. He stole her fire. Undoubtedly the entertainment at the Black Sadie Cabaret was vastly more popular since he came. Never could there be such a traps man. And he could dance! Sadie was jealous of sharing honors with him in her own cabaret. She hoped for occasions to humiliate him. If she could just 'get his goat'!

But the Lazy Tiger treated her indifferently. He behaved exactly as though the whole 'show' belonged to him. Sadie's dancing seemed at his command. The impudent, low-down nigger! Nothing Sadie could do got the slightest 'rise' out of him. The situation made Sadie very angry.

She complained to the manager, but got nothing for her pains. She went to Corda on the subject, and Corda snubbed her. Told her to mind her own business. She tried Fellows. Fellows snorted angrily. His mood gave Sadie no satisfaction. So she went to her lawyer. 'Keep Smiling' said the framed motto on Harvey's desk, but nothing to be got from ​Harvey. 'Ah, Lord!' said Aunt Sally Bremmer, when she listened to the rehearsal of Sadie's jealous story. 'Ain't nigger men turrubul!'

Sadie went again to Fellows. She had a plan. She proposed it. Fellows's eyes glittered. Trick on Corda and Lazy Tiger? He promised Sadie his unalloyed assistance. 'I'll show that coon something he'll remember,' declared Black Sadie.

Two nights later the cabaret was packed with smart, dissipated people. Both Corda and Fellows were there. The Lazy Tiger reigned in the orchestra. He had a new trick . . . rising to his feet for a step or two between beats, vaulting over the bass drum into his seat again, and resuming the rhythm of the music by tearing up strips of silk. All eyes were upon him.

'What is this New Dance on the card?' asked Corda, leaning toward Fellows. 'Who does it, Black Sadie or the Lazy Tiger? I didn't authorize it.'

'Wait and see,' said Fellows. 'I brought you here particularly to see it. I arranged it myself.'

Corda sent secretly to find out if Sadie were in her dressing-room. No. Then the New ​Dance must be something for the Lazy Tiger to do. Corda felt pleased at that. She sat back in her little gilded chair with happy complacency.

She had not long to wait. In less than a quarter of an hour, the manager appeared on the orchestra platform. The music stopped. 'New Dance!' he shouted. 'The Black Sadie!'

The orchestra boys were ready. The familiar Black Sadie air on saxophones and strings. But the traps man looked taken by surprise. He fumbled his sticks and paraphernalia. He was not ready for the 'act.' Was it possible that he had not been informed?

But no time to waste. Black Sadie was already in the dancing oval. The onlookers gave a gasp of amazement. There was Black Sadie, literally, like the First Prize, nude save for flashing little clusters of gems strapped to her person. Her ebony skin shone; her hair bristled in a savage bush above her pear-shaped skull. Up were her hands behind her head, and she danced . . . as never before . . . a dead set at Marcus.

Uproar. Laughter, clapping, calls. The music wailed and clashed. The dance lasted scarcely a minute. She was gone again before ​the astonishment of patrons, of Corda Van Corda, of the Lazy Tiger, could die. Over the tables she flung handfuls of Black Sadie tulips. Then she was upon Marcus with a great white rose. She thrust it against his face, against his nose.

The Lazy Tiger sprang to his feet. Tears streamed from his eyes. His olive-green silk person bent in a spasm of sneezing. Everybody roared with laughter, led by the orchestra boys. They did not like the popular traps man.

Trick! Black Sadie had had her innings with the Lazy Tiger. Open war. But she was gone.

'Black Sadie! Black Sadie!' shouted the guests.

Corda Van Corda was furious. She swept out of the restaurant. She made a frightful scene in Sadie's dressing-room. There Fellows found the two cats, the white and the black, scratching at each other. Sadie sat on the dresser, still nude, pouting, sullen, delighted. Corda paced the floor. She trembled with anger. 'Brava!' cried Fellows. He drew the storming Corda off.

The Lazy Tiger was no good for the rest of the night. He sneezed continually, and his ​eyes ran. The violent red pepper. He changed his clothes and left the cabaret.

Black Sadie dressed herself and motored to her apartment. She was quite satisfied with her performance. What matter if she had not told Fellows of the biting powder in the white rose? That was her lookout. It could be settled later. She was wholly glad to have played off Marcus. 'His goat' at last.

Nearly daylight. Sadie made herself a cup of cocoa and went to bed. It was an unusual thing for her to spend the night in the apartment.

When Aunt Sally Bremmer got up at crack of dawn to begin the duties of the day, she noticed that Sadie's door was ajar. She peeped into the room. No Sadie. Smooth bed. Now, where could 'dat chile be'? Sunrise; mighty late for Sadie to be still at the cabaret. She was usually in between four and five.

Aunt Sally climbed the stairs to the top of the house. She knocked at Lucky Andrew's door. Where was Sadie? Did he know? Andrew didn't. He had heard her motor drive off from the cabaret before two o'clock. Aunt Sally expressed herself as 'oneasy.' Would Andrew please go back to the cabaret and in​quire? Would he inquire at the apartment? She gave him a cup of hot coffee before he left. Andrew grumbled at the foolish errand, but he went at Aunt Sally's wish to look for Sadie.

Broad day in the streets. People going to work. Harlem ahum.

When Sadie grew famous and well-to-do, she gave up wearing white cotton nightgowns. She adopted instead colored pongee pyjamas. And she had colored silk boudoir caps to match the pyjamas.

A janitress came every morning to Sadie's apartment to dust and set things to rights. Her name was Pearl, and when she was sober, she was quite good-natured, but it was not very often. Usually she did the work in very bad temper, but she did it very well.

The night Sadie treated the Lazy Tiger to a sniff of red pepper, she slept in her apartment. In the morning a noise of some one moving a chair in the next room awoke Sadie from sleep. Of course it must be Pearl. Sadie called to her. No answer.

Out of the bed she got in her green pongee pyjamas and silk headgear, green Russian leather mules on her feet. Sadie opened the ​door into the next room. The heavy draperies were drawn across the big windows, so the light was quite dim. Sadie could barely see the tables and chairs. She peered about in the shadows. No Pearl. Silence.

At that moment the draperies moved. Sunlight shot into the room. Standing in the folds of the curtains was Marcus. Sadie stood stock-still looking at him, and Marcus held his ground looking at her. She swallowed hard to recover her voice. She was badly frightened.

'What you want, nigger? How you git in my apartment?'

Marcus did not speak. What are locks to men-about-town?

Sadie saw that his eyes were still badly inflamed . . . and the villainous set of his jaw . . . head thrust forward . . . On the table by her bed was a telephone. Could she reach it? Could she get inside the bedroom, slam and lock the door so quickly that Marcus could not follow?

'You git outen here.' She fenced for time. Perhaps he would go away.

'I ain't er-goin' ter leave dis place till I done had my satisfaction wid you.' The Lazy Tiger spoke softly, slowly.

​'I ain't got no money,' said Sadie desperately.

''Tain't money I wants,' answered Marcus. 'It's you, you sweet little black bitch.'

'Oh, my Gawd!' cried Sadie. 'Don't you tetch me, nigger.' But Sadie realized mere bold words were worse than useless. She was helpless.

Still Marcus did not move.

Sadie thought again of the telephone. Could she make it? Backwards she sprang, slamming the door. But Marcus was just as quick. He caught the door with his foot as it swung to. In an instant he had Sadie by the arm. Sadie fought like a tigress. She scratched. She bit. She wriggled and kicked. The green leather mules flew off her toes. The green pyjama jacket was torn into shreds. Marcus gripped her. They smashed over a chair. They crashed into the table. Telephone and a number of small objects rattled all over the floor.

'If you hollers, I'll kill you.'

But Sadie had not thought of calling. Locked in his arms, she fought with all her strength. No avail. Marcus bore down her resistance. 'Nigger! Nigger!' Sadie sobbed.

Some one at the door. Marcus did not hear. ​Sadie did not hear. She gave way before her assailant, limp in his arms.

But at that precise moment some terrible force wrenched Marcus away. Aunt Sally Bremmer had not sent Andrew to look for Sadie for nothing. The coal-heaving, ditch-digging arms of Lucky Andrew lifted Marcus clean off the floor. 'Oh, my Gawd! Oh, my Gawd!' choked Sadie.

It did not take Andrew long to kill Marcus. He laid the limp body on the floor. Quite a quick job. Andrew was satisfied. He stood stupidly by, rubbing his big calloused hands. Easy come, easy go, matters of life and death to some people. The Ritchies.

What now?

Sadie recovered her wits. She slipped on a dressing-gown and took charge of the situation. Something had to be done as quickly as possible. No doubt about it, Marcus was certainly dead. Sadie glanced down at his doubled-up body. Many horrible thoughts ran through her head. What if Pearl should come! The police . . .? The body must be got out of the way. Oblivion, too, for herself and Andrew. Inconsequential for such as Marcus and Andrew to disappear . . . easy come, easy go for ​obscure negro men. But Sadie? Could she disappear so smoothly? New York and the world knew her very well. It is sometimes a great handicap to be famous. Sadie generated but one thought; escape.

She made Andrew drag out of the closet an enormous Saratoga trunk. Together they crushed the body of Marcus inside, locked and strapped down the lid. Then Sadie dressed herself. She packed a suitcase with clothes. She dug out of her flower boxes the buried rope of pearls. She was ready to leave.

Pearl ambled in to do her morning's chores. She was sober. Therefore in a pleasant frame of mind. Sadie announced that she was going on a trip. Would Pearl call up her husband from the basement to help Andrew carry the trunk downstairs? Such a plausible tale. Pearl never doubted a word of it.

A taxi came. On went the trunk. Sadie and Andrew inside. At the Grand Central Station, Sadie bought a ticket for Chicago, and on it she checked the large Saratoga trunk. On Forty-Second Street, she met Andrew. She gave him the ticket. She tore up the check and threw it away.

Good-bye, Lucky Andrew! A simple matter ​for you to fade into oblivion . . . Chicago . . . the West . . . the coal mines . . . easy come, easy go.

Sadie shook hands with Lucky Andrew. Then she got into a taxi. She got out at the Pennsylvania Station. Good-bye, New York! Niggers surely do have trouble! Sadie stuffed her fingers in her ears when the train dashed through the tubes under the Hudson River.

Philadelphia. In Broad Street Station Black Sadie walked unnoticed in the crowd. Just a colored girl. She bought a ticket for Washington. Express at two o'clock.

White-coated porters stood at the little steps before the entrances to the Pullman cars. They carried whisk-brooms in their hands. 'Parlor car? Parlor car?' they called. Some people handed them their grips and mounted the little step into the car; others looked away, passing down the platform to the coaches ahead. Parlor car? Parlor car? Train for Chester, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Washington, leaving two o'clock; change in Washington for points south and west.

One of the Pullman cars was called Altoona. When Black Sadie came down the platform on ​her way to the day coach, the porter of the Altoona grinned with pleasure. He recognized her instantly. Sadie recognized him too. It was Peter.

On the way from Philadelphia to Washington, Peter went forward a number of times to talk to Sadie. Sadie was rejoiced to see him. Let by-gones be by-gones. Peter was just the same. Sadie too. Surely they were made for each other.

Where was Sadie going? Home; tired of New York; tired of Yankee white folks; home. Was this Peter's route? Yes; Philadelphia to Washington. Married? Oh, no. 'I never could love nobody but you, Sadie.' Same with Sadie. 'Then, let's us git married at las'?' asked Peter.

Peter had a little place in Virginia, near Washington. He wanted to farm. He had bees. Sadie would like it. Sadie thought she would. How satisfactory everything was!

When they reached Washington, Peter and Sadie went to get a marriage license. Sadie told Peter if he wanted her to call herself Lily she would. Peter had always wanted that. So Sadie wrote down her name as Lily Harrison, from Newark, New Jersey. They stood up ​before a colored minister-preacher in Georgetown and that night they spent under their own roof on the Virginia side of the Potomac River.

'No use in making a row,' remonstrated Fellows to Corda Van Corda. 'The niggers are gone. Look for a needle in a haystack! We'll get another girl somewhere, and a traps man. The cabaret public will be none the wiser. Eh, old darling?'

'A rose by any other name will smell as sweet.' The popular Black Sadie Cabaret continued to do an excellent business.

The body of Marcus lay in the Chicago morgue for several days. Dead coon. Nobody claimed it, so it was given to medical men for scientific purposes.

Easy come, easy go, niggers.