Rudolph Fisher
The arcadia, on Harlem’s Lenox Avenue, is “The World’s Largest and Finest Ballroom—Admission Eighty-five Cents.” Jazz is its holy spirit, which moves it continuously from 9 till 2 every night. Observe above the brilliant entrance this legend in white fire:
TWO—ORCHESTRAS—TWO
Below this in red:
FESS BAXTER’S FIREMEN
Alongside in blue:
BUS WILLIAMS’S BLUE DEVILS
Still lower in gold:
HEAR THEM OUTPLAY EACH OTHER
So much outside. Inside, a blazing lobby, flanked by marble stairways. Upstairs, an enormous dance hall the length of a city block. Low ceilings blushing pink with rows of inverted dome lights. A broad dancing area, bounded on three sides by a wide, soft-carpeted promenade, on the fourth by an ample platform accommodating the two orchestras.
People. Flesh. A fly-thick jam of dancers on the floor, grimly jostling each other; a milling herd of thirsty-eyed boys, moving slowly, searchingly over the carpeted promenade; a congregation of languid girls, lounging in rows of easy-chairs here and there, bodies and faces unconcerned, dark eyes furtively alert. A restless multitude of empty, romance-hungry lives.
Bus Williams’s jolly round brown face beamed down on the crowd as he directed his popular hit—“She’s Still My Baby.”
You take her out to walk
And give her baby-talk.
But talk or walk, walk or talk—
She’s still my baby!
But the cheese-colored countenance of Fessenden Baxter, his professional rival, who with his orchestra occupied the adjacent half of the platform, was totally oblivious to “She’s Still My Baby.”
Baxter had just caught sight of a girl, and catching sight of girls was one of his special accomplishments. Unbelief, wonder, amazement registered in turn on his blunt, bright features. He passed a hand over his straightened brown hair and bent to Perry Parker, his trumpetist.
“P.P. do you see what I see, or is it only the gin?”
“Both of us had the gin,” said P.P. “so both of us sees the same thing.”
“Judas Priest! Look at that figure, boy!”
“Never was no good at figures,” said P.P.
“I’ve got to get me an armful of that baby.”
“Lay off, papa,” advised P.P.
“What do you mean, lay off?”
“Lay off. You and your boy got enough to fight over already, ain’t you?”
“My boy?”
“Your boy, Bus.”
“You mean that’s Bus Williams’s folks?”
“No lie. Miss Jean Ambrose, lord. The newest hostess. Bus got her the job.”
Fess Baxter’s eyes followed the girl. “Oh, he got her the job, did he?—Well, I’m going to fix it so she won’t need any job. Woman like that’s got no business working anywhere.”
“Gin,” murmured P.P.
“Gin hell,” said Baxter. “Gunpowder wouldn’t make a mama look as good as that.”
“Gunpowder wouldn’t make you look so damn good, either.”
“You hold the cat’s tail,” suggested Baxter.
“I’m tryin’ to save yours,” said P.P.
“Save your breath for that horn.”
“Maybe,” P.P. insisted, “she ain’t so possible as she looks.”
“Hush. They can all be taught.”
“I’ve seen some that couldn’t.”
“Oh you have?—Well, P.P. my boy, remember, that’s you.”
Beyond the brass rail that limited the rectangular dance area at one lateral extreme, there were many small round tables and clusters of chairs. Bus Williams and the youngest hostess occupied one of these tables while Fess Baxter’s Firemen strutted their stuff.
Bus ignored the tall glass before him, apparently endeavoring to drain the girl’s beauty with his eyes; a useless effort since it lessened neither her loveliness nor his thirst. Indeed the more he looked the less able was he to stop looking. Oblivious, the girl was engrossed in the crowd. Her amber skin grew clearer and the roses imprisoned in it brighter as her merry black eyes danced over the jostling company.
“Think you’ll like it?” he asked.
“Like it?” She was a child of Harlem and she spoke its language. “Boy, I’m having the time of my life. Imagine getting paid for this!”
“You ought to get a bonus for beauty.”
“Nice time to think of that—after I’m hired.”
“You look like a full course dinner—and I’m starved.”
“Hold the personalities, papa.”
“No stuff. Wish I could raise a loan on you. Baby—what a roll I’d tote.”
“Thanks. Try that big farmer over there hootin’ it with Sister Full-bosom. Boy, what a sideshow they’d make!”
“Yea. But what I’m lookin’ for is a leadin’ lady.”
“Yea? I got a picture of any lady leadin’ you anywhere.”
“You could, Jean.”
“Be yourself, brother.”
“I ain’t bein’ nobody else.”
“Well, be somebody else, then.”
“Remember the orphanage?”
“Time, papa. Stay out of my past.”
“Sure—if you let me into your future.”
“Speaking of the orphanage—?”
“You wouldn’t know it now. They got new buildings all over the place.”
“Somehow that fails to thrill me.”
“You always were a knockout, even in those days. You had the prettiest hair of any of the girls out there—and the sassiest hip-switch.”
“Look at Fred and Adele Astaire over there. How long they been doing blackface?”
“I used to watch you even then. Know what I used to say?”
“Yea. ‘Toot-a-toot-toot’ on a bugle.”
“That ain’t all I used to say to myself, ‘Boy, when that sister grows up, I’m going to—’.”
Her eyes grew suddenly onyx and stopped him like an abruptly reversed traffic signal.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
She smiled and began nibbling the straw in her glass.
“What’s the matter, Jean?”
“Nothing. Innocence. Nothing. Your boy plays a devilish one-step, doesn’t he?”
“Say. You think I’m jivin’, don’t you?”
“No, darling. I think you’re selling insurance.”
“Think I’m gettin’ previous just because I got you the job.”
“Funny, I never have much luck with jobs.”
“Well, I don’t care what you think. I’m going to say it.”
“Let’s dance.”
“I used to say to myself, ‘When that kid grows up, I’m going to ask her to marry me.”
She called his bluff. “Well, I’m grown up.”
“Marry me, will you, Jean?”
Her eyes relented a little in admiration of his audacity. Rarely did a sober aspirant have the courage to mention marriage.
“You’re good, Bus. I mean, you’re good.”
“Every guy ain’t a wolf, you know, Jean.”
“No. Some are just ordinary meat-hounds.”
From the change in his face she saw the depth of the thrust, saw pain where she had anticipated chagrin.
“Let’s dance,” she suggested again, a little more gently.
They had hardly begun when the number ended, and Fess Baxter stood before them, an ingratiating grin on his Swiss-cheese-colored face.
“Your turn, young fellow,” he said to Bus.
“Thoughtful of you, reminding me,” said Bus. “This is Mr. Baxter, Miss Ambrose.”
“It’s always been one of my ambitions,” said Baxter, “to dance with a sure-enough angel.”
“Just what I’d like to see you doin’,” grinned Bus.
“Start up your stuff and watch us,” said Baxter. “Step on it, brother. You’re holding up traffic.”
“Hope you get pinched for speedin’,” said Bus, departing.
The Blue Devils were in good form tonight, were really “bearin’ down” on their blues. Bus, their leader, however, was only going through the motions, waving his baton idly. His eyes followed Jean and Baxter, and it was nothing to his credit that the jazz maintained its spirit. Occasionally he lost the pair; a brace of young wild birds double-timed through the forest, miraculously avoiding the trees; an extremely ardent couple, welded together, did a decidedly localized mess-around; that gigantic black farmer whom Jean had pointed out sashayed into the line of vision, swung about, backed off, being fancy…
Abruptly, as if someone had caught and held his right arm, Bus’s baton halted above his head. His men kept on playing under the impulse of their own momentum, but Bus was a creature apart. Slowly his baton drooped, like the crest of a proud bird, beaten. His eyes died on their object and all his features sagged. On the floor 40 feet away, amid the surrounding clot of dancers, Jean and Baxter had stopped moving and were standing perfectly still. The girl had clasped her partner closer about the shoulders with both arms. Her face was buried in his chest.
Baxter, who was facing the platform, looked up and saw Bus staring. He drew the girl closer, grinning, and shut one eye.
They stood so a moment or an hour till Bus dragged his eyes away. Automatically he resumed beating time. Every moment or so his baton wavered, slowed, and hurried to catch up. The blues were very low-down, the nakedest of jazz, a series of periodic wails against a background of steady, slow rhythm, each pounding pulse descending inevitably, like leaden strokes of fate. Bus found himself singing the words of this grief-stricken lamentation:
Trouble—trouble has followed me all my days,
Trouble—trouble has followed my all my days—
Seems like trouble’s gonna follow me always.
The mob demanded an encore, a mob that knew its blues and liked them blue. Bus complied. Each refrain became bluer as it was caught up by a different voice: the wailing clarinet, the weeping C sax, the moaning B flat sax, the trombone, and Bus’s own plaintive tenor:
Baby—baby—my baby’s gone away,
Baby—baby—my baby’s gone away—
Seems like baby—my baby’s gone to stay.
Presently the thing beat itself out, and Bus turned to acknowledge applause. He broke a bow off in half. Directly before the platform stood Jean alone, looking up at him.
He jumped down. “Dance?”
“No. Listen. You know what I said at the table?”
“About—wolves?”
“Oh—that—?”
“Yea. I didn’t mean anything personal. Honest, I didn’t.” Her eyes besought his. “You didn’t think I meant anything personal, did you?”
“Course not.” He laughed. “I know now you didn’t mean anything.” He laughed again. “Neither one of us meant anything.”
Her eyes lifted, widened, fell. “Oh,” she said. “Neither one of us meant—anything.”
With a wry little smile, he watched her slip off through the crowd.
From his side of the platform Bus overheard Fess Baxter talking to Perry Parker. Baxter had a custom of talking while he conducted, the jazz serving to blanket his words. The blanket was not quite heavy enough tonight.
“P.P., old pooter, she fell.”
Parker was resting while the C sax took the lead. “She did?”
“No lie. She says, ‘You don’t leave me any time for cash customers.’”
“Yea?”
“Yes. And I says, ‘I’m a cash customer, baby. Just name your price.’”
Instantly Bus was across the platform and at him, clutched him by the collar, bent him back over the edge of the platform; and it was clear from the look in Bus’s eyes that he wasn’t just being playful.
“Name her!”
“Hey—what the hell you doin’?”
“Name her or I’ll drop you and jump in your face. I swear to—”
“Nellie!” gurgled Fessenden Baxter.
“Nellie who—damn it?”
“Nellie—Gray!”
“All right then!”
Baxter found himself again erect with dizzy suddenness.
The music had stopped, for the players had momentarily lost their breath. Baxter swore and impelled his men into action, surreptitiously adjusting his ruffled plumage.
The crowd had an idea what it was all about and many good-naturedly derided the victim as they passed:
“’Smatter, Fess? Goin’ in for toe-dancin’?”
“Nice back-dive, papa, but this ain’t no swimmin’ pool.”
Curry, the large, bald, yellow manager, also had an idea what it was all about and lost no time accosting Bus.
“Tryin’ to start somethin’?”
“No. Tryin’ to stop somethin’.”
“Well, if you gonna stop it with your hands, stop it outside. I ain’t got no permit for prize fights in here—’Course, if you guys can’t get on together I can maybe struggle along without one of y’ till I find somebody.”
Bus said nothing.
“Listen. You birds fight it out with them jazz sticks, y’ hear? Them’s your weapons. Nex’ Monday night’s the jazz contest. You’ll find out who’s the best man next Monday night. Might win more’n a lovin’ cup. And y’ might lose more. Get me?”
He stood looking sleekly sarcastic a moment, then went to give Baxter like counsel.
Rumor spread through the Arcadia’s regulars as night succeeded night.
A pair of buddies retired to the men’s room to share a half-pint of gin. One said to the other between gulps:
“Lord today! Ain’t them two roosters bearin’ down on the jazz!”
“No lie. They mussa had some this same licker.”
“Licker hell. Ain’t you heard ’bout it?”
“’Bout what?”
“They fightin’, Oscar, fightin’.”
“Gimme that bottle ’fo’ you swaller it. Fightin’? What you mean, fightin’?”
“Fightin’ over that new mama.”
“The honey-dew?”
“Right. They can’t use knives and they can’t use knucks. And so they got to fight it out with jazz.”
“Yea? Hell of a way to fight.”
“That’s the only way they’d be any fight. Bus Williams’d knock that yaller boy’s can off in a scrap.”
“I know it. Y’ought-a seen him grab him las’ night.”
“I did. They tell me she promised it to the one ’at wins this cup next Monday night.”
“Yea? Wisht I knowed some music.”
“Sho-nuff sheba all right. I got a long shout with her last night. Papa, she’s got everything!”
“Too damn easy on the eyes. Women like that ain’t no good ’cep’n to start trouble.”
“She sho’ could start it for me. I’d ’a’ been dancin’ with her yet, but my two-bitses give out. Spent two hard-earned bucks dancin’ with her, too.”
“Shuh! Might as well th’ow yo’ money in the street. What you git dancin’ with them hostesses?”
“You right there, brother. All I got out o’ that one was two dollars worth o’ disappointment.”
Two girl friends, lounging in adjacent easy-chairs, discussed the situation.
“I can’t see what she’s got so much more’n anybody else.”
“Me neither. I could look a lot better’n that if I didn’t have to work all day.”
“No lie. Scrubbin’ floors never made no bathin’ beauties.”
“I heard Fess Baxter jivin’ her while they was dancin’. He’s got a line, no stuff.”
“He’d never catch me with it.”
“No, dearie. He’s got two good eyes too, y’know.”
“Maybe that’s why he couldn’t see you flaggin’ ’im.”
“Be yourself, sister. He says to her, ‘Baby, when the boss hands me that cup.’”
“Hates hisself, don’t he?”
“‘When the boss hands me that cup,’ he says, ‘I’m gonna put it right in your arms.’”
“Yea. And I suppose he goes with the cup.”
“So she laughs and says, ‘Think you can beat him?’ So he says, ‘Beat him? Huh, that bozo couldn’t play a hand-organ.’”
“He don’t mean her no good though, this Baxter.”
“How do you know?”
“A kack like that never means a woman no good. The other one ast her to step off with him.”
“What!”
“Etta Pipp heard him. They was drinkin’ and she was at the next table.”
“Well, ain’t that somethin’! Ast her to step off with him. What’d she say?”
“Etta couldn’t hear no more.”
“Jus’ goes to show ya. What chance has a honest workin’ girl got?”
Bus confided in Tappen, his drummer.
“Tap,” he said, “ain’t it funny how a woman always seems to fall for a wolf?”
“No lie,” Tap agreed. “When a guy gets too deep, he’s long-gone.”
“How do you account for it, Tap?”
“I don’t. I jes’ play ’em light. When I feel it gettin’ heavy—boy, I run like hell.”
“Tap, what would you do if you fell for a girl and saw her neckin’ another guy?”
“I wouldn’t fall,” said Tappen, “so I wouldn’t have to do nothin’.”
“Well, but s’posin’ you did?”
“Well, if she was my girl, I’d knock the can off both of ’em.”
“S’posin’ she wasn’t your girl?”
“Well, if she wasn’t my girl, it wouldn’t be none o’ my business.”
“Yea, but a guy kind o’ hates to see an old friend gettin’ jived.”
“Stay out, papa. Only way to protect yourself.”
“S’posin’ you didn’t want to protect yourself? S’posin’ you wanted to protect the woman?”
“Humph! Who ever heard of a woman needin’ protection?”
“Ladies and gentlemen” sang Curry to the tense crowd that gorged the Arcadia. “Tonight is the night of the only contest of its kind in recorded history! On my left, Mr. Bus Williams, chief of the Blue Devils. On my right, Mr. Fessenden Baxter, leader of the Firemen. On this stand, the solid gold loving cup. The winner will claim the jazz championship of the world!”
“And the sweet mama too, how about it?” called a wag.
“Each outfit will play three numbers: a one-step, a foxtrot, and a blues number. With this stop watch which you see in my hand, I will time your applause after each number. The leader receiving the longest total applause wins the loving cup!”
“Yea—and some lovin’-up wid it!”
“I will now toss a coin to see who plays the first number!”
“Toss it out here!”
“Bus Williams’s Blue Devils, ladies and gentlemen, will play the first number!”
Bus’s philosophy of jazz held tone to be merely the vehicle of rhythm. He spent much time devising new rhythmic patterns with which to vary his presentations. Accordingly he depended largely on Tappen, his master percussionist, who knew every rhythmic monkey-shine with which to delight a gaping throng.
Bus had conceived the present piece as a chase, in which an agile clarinet eluded impetuous and turbulent traps. The other instruments were to be observers, chorusing their excitement while they urged the principals on.
From the moment the piece started something was obviously wrong. The clarinet was elusive enough, but its agility was without purpose. Nothing pursued it. People stopped dancing in the middle of the number and turned puzzled faces toward the platform. The trap-drummer was going through the motions faithfully but to no avail. His traps were voiceless, emitted mere shadows of sound. He was a deaf mute making a speech.
Brief, perfunctory, disappointed applause rose and fell at the number’s end. Curry announced its duration:
“Fifteen seconds flat!”
Fess Baxter, with great gusto, leaped to his post.
“The Firemen will play their first number!”
Bus was consulting Tappen. “For the love o’ Pete, Tap—?”
“Love o’ hell. Look a’ here.”
Bus looked—first at the trap-drum, then at the bass; snapped them with a finger, thumped them with his knuckles. There was almost no sound; each drum-sheet was dead, lax instead of taut, and the cause was immediately clear: each bore a short curved knife-cut following its edge a brief distance, a wound unnoticeable at a glance, but fatal to the instrument.
Bus looked at Tappen, Tappen looked at Bus.
“The cream-colored son of a buzzard!”
Fess Baxter, gleeful and oblivious, was directing the crowd about the floor at an exciting, exhausting pace, distorting, expanding, etherealizing their emotions with swift-changing dissonances. Contrary to Bus Williams’s philosophy, Baxter considered rhythm a mere rack upon which to hang his tonal tricks. The present piece was dizzy with sudden disharmonies, unexpected twists of phrase, successive false resolutions. Incidentally, however, there was nothing wrong with Baxter’s drums.
Boiling over, Bus would have started for him, but Tappen grabbed his coat.
“Hold it, papa. That’s a sure way to lose. Maybe we can choke him yet.”
“Yea—?”
“I’ll play the wood. And I still got cymbals and sandpaper.”
“Yea—and a triangle. Hell of a lot o’ good they are.”
“Can’t quit,” said Tappen.
“Well,” said Bus.
Baxter’s number ended in a furor.
“Three minutes and twenty seconds!” bellowed Curry as the applause eventually died out.
Bus began his second number, a foxtrot. In the midst of it he saw Jean dancing, beseeching him with bewildered dismay in her eyes, a look that at once crushed and crazed him. Tappen rapped on the rim of his trap drum, tapped his triangle, stamped the pedal that clapped the cymbals, but the result was a toneless and hollow clatter, a weight-less noise that bounced back from the multitude instead of penetrating into it. The players also, distracted by the loss, were operating far below par, and not all their leader’s frantic false enthusiasm could compensate for the gaping absence of bass. The very spine had been ripped out of their music, and Tappen’s desperate efforts were but the hopeless flutterings of a stricken, limp, pulseless heart.
“Forty-five seconds!” Curry announced. “Making a total so far of one minute flat for the Blue Devils! The Firemen will now play their second number!”
The Firemen’s foxtrot was Baxter’s rearrangement of Burleigh’s “Jean, My Jean,” and Baxter, riding his present advantage hard, stressed all that he had put into it of tonal ingenuity. The thing was delirious with strange harmonies, iridescent with odd color changes, and its very flamboyance, its musical fine-writing and conceits delighted the dancers.
But it failed to delight Jean Ambrose, whom by its title it was intended to flatter. She rushed to Bus.
“What is it?” She was a-quiver.
“Drums, gone. Somebody cut the pigskin the last minute.”
“What? Somebody? Who?”
“Cut ’em with a knife close to the rim.”
“Cut? He cut—? Oh, Bus!” She flashed Baxter a look that would have crumpled his assurance had he seen it. “Can’t you—Listen.” She was at once wild and calm. “It’s the bass. You got to have—I know! Make ’em stamp their feet! Your boys, I mean. That’ll do it. All of ’em. Turn the blues into a shout.”
“Yea? Gee. Maybe—”
“Try it! You’ve got to win this thing.”
An uproar that seemed endless greeted Baxter’s version of “Jean.” The girl, back out on the floor, managed to smile as Baxter acknowledged the acclaim by gesturing toward her.
“The present score, ladies and gentlemen, is—for the Blue Devils, one minute even; for the Firemen, six minutes and thirty seconds! The Devils will now play their last number.” Curry’s intonation of “last” moved the mob to laughter.
Into that laughter Bus grimly led his men like a captain leading his command into fire. He had chosen the parent of blue songs, the old St. Louis Blues, and he adduced every device that had ever adorned that classic. Clarinets wailed, saxophones moaned, trumpets wept wretchedly, trombones laughed bitterly, even the great bass horn sobbed dismally from the depths. And so perfectly did the misery in the music express the actual despair of the situation that the crowd was caught from the start. Soon dancers closed their eyes, forgot their jostling neighbors, lost themselves bodily in the easy sway of that slow, fateful measure, vaguely aware that some quality hitherto lost had at last been found. They were too wholly absorbed to note just how that quality had been found: that every player softly dropped his heel where each bass drum beat would have come, giving each major impulse a body and breadth that no drum could have achieved. Zoom—zoom—zoom—zoom. It was not a mere sound; it was a vibrant throb that took hold of the crowd and rocked it.
They had been rocked thus before, this multitude. Two hundred years ago they had swayed to that same slow fateful measure, lifting their lamentation to heaven, pounding the earth with their feet, seeking the mercy of a new God through the medium of an old rhythm, zoom—zoom. They had rocked so a thousand years ago in a city whose walls were jungle, forfending the wrath of a terrible black God who spoke in storm and pestilence, had swayed and wailed to that same slow period, beaten on a wild boar’s skin stretched over the end of a hollow treetrunk. Zoom—zoom—zoom—zoom. Not a sound but an emotion that laid hold on their bodies and swung them into the past. Blues—low-down blues, indeed—blues that reached their souls’ depths.
But slowly the color changed. Each player allowed his heel to drop less and less softly. Solo parts faded out, and the orchestra began to gather power as a whole. The rhythm persisted, the unfaltering common meter of blues, but the blueness itself, the sorrow, the despair, began to give way to hope. Ere long hope came to the verge of realization—mounted it—rose above it. The deep and regular impulses now vibrated like nearing thunder, a mighty, inescapable, all-embracing dominance, stressed by the contrast of wind-tones; an all-pervading atmosphere through which soared wild-winged birds. Rapturously, rhapsodically, the number rose to madness and at the height of its madness, burst into sudden silence.
Illusion broke. Dancers awoke, dropped to reality with a jolt. Suddenly the crowd appreciated that Bus Williams had returned to form, had put on a comeback, had struck off a masterpiece. And the crowd showed its appreciation. It applauded its palms sore.
Curry’s suspense-ridden announcement ended.
“Total—for the Blue Devils, seven minutes and forty seconds! For the Firemen, six minutes and thirty seconds! Maybe that wasn’t the Devils’ last number after all. The Firemen will play THEIR last number!”
It was needless for Baxter to attempt the depths and heights just attained by Bus Williams’s Blue Devils. His speed, his subordination of rhythm to tone, his exotic coloring, all were useless in a low-down blues song. The crowd moreover had nestled upon the broad, sustaining bosom of a shout. Nothing else warmed them. The end of Baxter’s last piece left them chilled and unsatisfied.
But if Baxter realized that he was beaten, his attitude failed to reveal it. Even when the major volume of applause died out in a few seconds, he maintained his self-assured grin. The reason was soon apparent: although the audience as a whole had stopped applauding, two small groups of assiduous hand-clappers, one at either extreme of the dancing area, kept up a diminutive, violent clatter.
Again Bus and Tappen exchanged sardonic stares.
“Damn’ if he ain’t PAID somebody to clap!”
Only the threatening hisses and boos of the majority terminated this clatter, whereupon Curry summed up:
“For Bus Williams’s Blue Devils—seven minutes and forty seconds! For Fess Baxter’s Firemen—eight minutes flat!”
He presented Baxter the loving cup amid a hubbub of murmurs, handclaps, shouts, and hisses that drowned out whatever he said. Then the hubbub hushed. Baxter was assisting Jean Ambrose to the platform. With a bow and a flourish he handed the girl the cup.
She held it for a moment in both hands, uncertain, hesitant. But there was nothing uncertain or hesitant in the mob’s reaction. Feeble applause was overwhelmed in a deluge of disapprobation. Cries of “Crooked!” “Don’t take it!” “Crown the cheat!” “He stole it!” stood out. Tappen put his finger in the slit in his trap-drum, ripped it to a gash, held up the mutilated instrument, and cried, “Look what he done to my traps!” A few hard-boiled ruffians close to the platform moved menacingly toward the victor. “Grab ’im! Knock his can off!”
Jean’s uncertainty abruptly vanished. She wheeled with the trophy in close embrace and sailed across the platform toward the defeated Bus Williams. She smiled into his astonished face and thrust the cup into his arms.
“Hot damn, mama! That’s the time!” cried a jubilant voice from the floor, and instantly the gathering storm of menace broke into a cloudburst of delight. That romance-hungry multitude saw Bus Williams throw his baton into the air and gather the girl and the loving cup both into his arms. And they went utterly wild—laughed, shouted, yelled and whistled till the walls of the Arcadia bulged.
Jazz emerged as the mad noise subsided: Bus Williams’s Blue Devils playing “She’s Still My Baby.”
In the shelter of a nearby night club Bus and his girl found a secluded corner.
“But you said you didn’t mean—anything.”
“I’m an awful liar sometimes. Specially when I see my girl giving another guy a play.”
“Giving who a play?”
“My boy, Baxter.”
“When?”
“Out on the floor that first night. Baby, you draped yourself over him like a Spanish shawl. And there wasn’t any movement to speak of.”
Her brow cleared and she heaved a sigh. “Well, they say when a guy really falls he quits using his bean.”
“He don’t go blind, does he?”
“You did. Didn’t you see that big farmer step on my foot? For a minute I thought I’d faint!”