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THE SLEEPER WAKES -- HARLEM RENAISSANCE STORIES BY WOMEN |
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Summer Session "You were flirting with him!" "I was not. I don't know how to flirt." "So you say, but you can put up a pretty good imitation." "You're mistaken." "I am not. And a man you never saw before in your life. And a common taxi driver." "He's not a common taxi driver." "How do you know?" "I just know." "Strange exchange of intimacies for the first meeting." "I tell you --" "Shut up!" "I won't shut up, and don't you dare tell me that again!" There was a warning note in her usually gentle voice; an ominous tightening of her soft lips; a steely glint in her violet eyes. Logan heeded the warning and sat in grim silence, while Elise ground gears and otherwise mishandled her little car through the snarled traffic of Amsterdam Avenue. "You told me 114th Street, and I waited for you there for a half hour, and I got jammed in the traffic and things went wrong, and this young man got out of his taxi, and straightened me out. And while I waited for you he just stayed and talked." "To your delight." "What was I to do? Push him away from the running board? I was standing still, and I couldn't drive away since I was waiting for you." "I told you 115th Street, and there I stood on the corner in the broiling sun for a half-hour, while you were carrying on a flirtation with a taxi driver, until I walked back, thinking you might have had an accident." "Don't you say flirtation to me again. You said 114th Street. You never speak plain over the telephone anyhow." "Anything else wrong with me since you've met your new friend The Taxi Adonis?" Elise brought the car to a grinding, screeching pause in front of the movie house which was their objective. They sat through the two hours of feature and news and cartoons and comedy and prevues in stony silence. They ate a grim meal together in the usual cafeteria, and she set him down at the men's dormitory of the university in the same polite and frigid silence. Logan glanced at her now and then just a trifle apprehensively. He had never seen just this trace of hardness in her, like the glint of unexpected steel beneath soft chiffon. But his manly dignity would not permit him to unbend. He answered her cold good- night with one as cold, and for the first time in that summer session, during which they had grown to know and like one another, they parted without making a future date. He waited for her next day at luncheon hour, as she came from her class with a half dozen other chattering summer-school teacher-students. His manner was graciously condescending. "Shall we have luncheon together?" Lordly and superior as usual. She flashed her usual violet-eyed smile of delight, but he felt, rather than saw, that the smile did not quite reach the eyes; that the violets were touched as by premature frost. "What I can't quite understand," he pursued, after he had brought her tray, deftly removed the salad, tea, and crackers, and placed the tray behind the next chair, "is, if you are skillful enough to drive from Portland, Maine, to New York alone and without disaster, how you can get mixed up in a mere traffic jam on Amsterdam Avenue, and have to have a taxi driver get you out." Elise's brows went up at the awkward English, so at variance with his usual meticulous and precise phrasing, and a haunting query clouded her eyes. Logan quenched an embarrassed "Hem" in iced tea. "I did not drive from Portland," was her final response. "I came from my own town, twenty-seven miles beyond Portland." There was no particular reason for Elise's driving down Amsterdam Avenue after classes that afternoon, but she did and a friendly red light brought her to a halt at 114th Street. Adonis -- Logan's sneering cognomen stuck in her mind, and she realized with a guilty start how ruggedly applicable it was -- stuck his face in her car window. Poppies suffused her cheeks and dewey violets swam in a sea of flame. "All right?" he queried. "Quite, thank you." The light was happily yellow, and she meshed her gears. "What's the hurry?" He put a protesting hand on the wheel. "I have an engagement!" She sped away frantically. Adonis whistled at the wabbling career of her little coupe down the street. She saw him just ahead of her in the cafeteria line next evening at dinner time. She reached for her tray with hands that insisted upon trembling, though she shook them angrily. He smiled daringly back at her. He was even handsomer out of his taxi uniform than in it, and the absence of the cap revealed crisp auburn curls of undoubted pugnaciousness. "You get a seat, I'll bring your dinner." "But I --" "Go on --" There was a difference between Adonis' ordering of her movements and that of Logan's. A sureness of merry audacity against prim didacticism. She sat at a window table and meekly arranged silver napkins. "But I could never eat all that," she protested at the tray, "Beef and potatoes and -- and -- all that food." "I knew that's what's the trouble -- diet of salads and iced tea and crackers, mentally, spiritually, physically." Elise ate roast beefand corn on the cob and pie ala mode and laughed at Adonis' jokes, and his whimsical descriptions of man and his appetites. Over their cigarettes she chuckled at his deft characterizations of their fellow diners. "Eat hay and think hay," he was saying, "thin diets and thin souls. You need a red-blooded chap like me to make you eat food, put flesh on your bones and reconstruct your thinking from New England inhibitions to New York acceptance and enjoyment of life." Elise's world rocked. School principals used muddled English. Taxi drivers talked like college professors. Adonis paused and regarded something on his shoulder as if it were a tarantula. Logan's hand quivered in rage, and veins stood up on its pallor "like long blue whips," Elise found herself thinking. "Aren't you taking a lot of liberties with a young lady to whom you've not been introduced?" snarled the owner of pallor and veins. Adonis brushed off the hand and the remark with a careless gesture. He arose and bowed elaborately. "Miss Stone and I have been introduced, thank you, by ourselves -- and you?" Elise looked perilously near tears, "Oh, er -- Logan -- Mr. Long -- this is -- er -- Mr. McShane." Logan looked stonily through Adonis, "I don't accept introductions to taxi drivers, even if you do eat with them, Elise." "Oh, please --" she began. "That's all right," Adonis gathered up the checks. "Just let me settle this with the cashier, and then if you don't mind, we'll go outside, and settle the physical difference between a taxi driver and --" He did not finish the sentence, but the sinister drawl and contemptuous pause made Elise's scalp prickle with shame for Logan. "You would suggest a common brawl; quite true to type. I hope, Elise, you have seen enough of such ruffianly conduct to be satisfied." "Quite the contrary," she answered cooly, "I am going out with Mr. McShane in his taxi." It was pure spite, and she had a sinking feeling that she might not be wanted. "Terry to you," he retorted, "and let's be going. We've got a busy evening before us." Logan was beside them on the sidewalk, blocking the way to the taxi parked at the curb. "Elise, don't be a fool." He grasped her arm and wrenched it, so that she gave an involuntary cry of pain. Terence McShane's next three moves were so violently consecutive as to seem simultaneous. His right hand caught Logan neatly on the point of the chin, so that he went down with amazing swiftness; his left encircled Elise's waist and lifted her into the taxi, and both hands swung the machine with a roar and sputter in the general direction of the Washington bridge. "But you're losing fares," Elise protested. "Nonsense. If you can stand this bumpety-bump, what's the dif?" "It's entrancing," she murmured at the river, the sky, the stars, the electric signs on the Jersey shore, at Terry's hatless curls. "Police call," the radio protested, "calling all police cars. Lookout for taxi license Y327D. Driver abducted summer school student. Watch for taxi. Arrest driver. Kidnapping charge." From their leafy shelter, where somehow the taxi had parked itself -- neither could have told when or how it stopped under those particularly umbrageous trees, they stared at the radio's accusing dial. "Well, I'll be --" Terry swore softly, "What do you think of that worm putting in such a charge at headquarters?" "Oh, Terry, you'll be arrested and put in jail!" "Will you go to jail with me?" "You know I will -- oh, what am I saying?" "Words of wisdom, me darlin'. Let's go. Anyhow I'm glad we didn't cross the bridge and get into Jersey." Through circuitous ways and dark streets, avoiding police, taxis, inquisitive small boys and reporters on the loose, they drew up in front of police headquarters. Elise sat demurely on a bench, and began to repair damages, to her hair, complexion, and neck frills. The little pocket mirror wavered ever so slightly as Logan stood accusingly in front of her, but her eyes did not leave the scrutiny of their mirrored counterpart. "A pretty mess you've made of your life and reputation," he thundered. "Your chances for any position in my school are gone." Elise put back a refractory curl behind her ear, then tried it out on her cheek again, surveying it critically in the mirror. "Won't you recommend me for a job, Mr. Principal, after I've studied so hard all summer?" Terry's gales of unrestrained mirth at the desk made them both look up in amazement. Laughter rocked the walls of the station house, rolled out into the summer street. Captain and Sergeant and Lieutenant and just plain officers roared lustily, all save one quiet plainclothes man, who laid an iron grip on Logan's arm. "Terence McShane, you were always the best detective in the city," roared the Captain. "And you made him bring himself right into our outstretched arms." The iron grip on Logan's arm terminated into steel bracelets. "Okeh, Longjim Webb, alias Prof. Logan Long, the school principal, looking the summer students over for teaching material in his consolidated upstate school, we'll give you a chance in the Big House to meditate on the law against white slavery." "Your zeal to corral this particular choice bit of femininity made you throw caution to the winds," suggested Detective Terrence McShane. Incredulity, disgust, anger swept the violet eyes. Elise flared into Terry's face. "You -- you -- pretending to be a taxi driver. You just used me for a decoy," she raged. Terry held her protesting hands tight as he whispered below the hubbub of Logan's protestations. "Never a bit of it, my dear. I loved you the first day you stalled your car in the thick of things on 125th Street, before you even saw me, and I got in the habit of following you around while I was impersonating a taxi driver, to get a chance to know you. Then when I found this --" a wave towards the still-voluble Logan -- "had marked you for another one of his prey -- well you don't mind if I combined a bit of business with my pleasure?" Elise's faint "Na" was visible, rather than audible. "It's all right then? Shall it be beefsteak for two?" "Yes." "And you won't take back what you promised up there on the Drive?" "How can I," she laughed, "when my middle name is McBride?" CA. 1928-1932, UNPUBLISHED
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