moon smiled misty-eyed upon the sea,
and as the shore faded dimly out and dark clouds were blown like
leaves along the far horizon a great haze of moonshine suddenly bathed
the yacht and spread an avenue of glittering mail in her swift path.
From time to time there was the bright flare of a match as one of them
lighted a cigarette, but except for the low under-tone of the throbbing
engines and the even wash of the waves about the stern the yacht was
quiet as a dream boat star-bound through the heavens. Round them
bowed the smell of the night sea, bringing with it an infinite languor.
Carlyle broke the silence at last.
"Lucky girl," he sighed "I've always wanted to be rich--and buy all this
beauty."
Ardita yawned.
"I'd rather be you," she said frankly.
"You would--for about a day. But you do seem to possess a lot of nerve
for a flapper."
"I wish you wouldn't call me that"
"Beg your pardon."
"As to nerve," she continued slowly, "it's my one redeemiug feature.
I'm not afraid of anything in heaven or earth."
"Hm, I am."
"To be afraid," said Ardita, "a person has either to be very great and
strong--or else a coward. I'm neither." She paused for a moment, and
eagerness crept into her tone. "But I want to talk about you. What on
earth have you done--and how did you do it?"
"Why?" he demanded cynically. "Going to write a movie, about me?"
"Go on," she urged. "Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story."
A negro appeared, switched on a string of small lights under the
awning, and began setting the wicker table for supper. And while they
ate cold sliced chicken, salad, artichokes and strawberry jam from the
plentiful larder below, Carlyle began to talk, hesitatingly at first, but
eagerly as he saw she was interested. Ardita scarcely touched her food
as she watched his dark young face--handsome, ironic faintly
ineffectual.
He began life as a poor kid in a Tennessee town, he said, so poor that
his people were the only white family in their street. He never
remembered any white children--but there were inevitably a dozen
pickaninnies streaming in his trail, passionate admirers whom he kept
in tow by the vividness of his imagination and the amount of trouble he
was always getting them in and out of. And it seemed that this
association diverted a rather unusual musical gift into a strange
channel.
There had been a colored woman named Belle Pope Calhoun who
played the piano at parties given for white children--nice white children
that would have passed Curtis Carlyle with a sniff. But the ragged little
"poh white" used to sit beside her piano by the hour and try to get in an
alto with one of those kazoos that boys hum through. Before he was
thirteen he was picking up a living teasing ragtime out of a battered
violin in little cafés round Nashville. Eight years later the ragtime craze
hit the country, and he took six darkies on the Orpheum circuit. Five of
them were boys he had grown up with; the other was the little mulatto,
Babe Divine, who was a wharf nigger round New York, and long
before that a plantation hand in Bermuda, until he stuck an eight-inch
stiletto in his master's back. Almost before Carlyle realized his good
fortune he was on Broadway, with offers of engagements on all sides,
and more money than he had ever dreamed of.
It was about then that a change began in his whole attitude, a rather
curious, embittering change. It was when he realized that he was
spending the golden years of his life gibbering round a stage with a lot
of black men. His act was good of its kind--three trombones, three
saxaphones, and Carlyle's flute--and it was his own peculiar sense of
rhythm that made all the difference; but he began to grow strangely
sensitive about it, began to hate the thought of appearing, dreaded it
from day to day.
They were making money--each contract he signed called for more--but
when he went to managers and told them that he wanted to separate
from his sextet and go on as a regular pianist, they laughed at him aud
told him he was crazy--it would he an artistic suicide. He used to laugh
afterward at the phrase "artistic suicide." They all used it.
Half a dozen times they played at private dances at three thousand
dollars a night, and it seemed as if these crystallized all his distaste for
his mode of livlihood. They took place in clubs and houses that he
couldn't have gone into in the daytime After all, he was merely playing
to rôle of the eternal monkey, a
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