served. Two flat-bellied hounds crawled out from under the cabin to lap up their share of the leavings. A coal-oil lamp was lighted. Corn-cob pipes were filled from a handful of leaf tobacco Sam'l Bradley kept in his "tobaccie-box." The tree-frogs and katydids whirred and croaked to one another outside. A foggy stillness moved up close to the little cabin. Miss Edie took to clearin' away the dishes while Jebbie and his soldier-boy friend from "up Louisville way" were poring over a copy-book, Jebbie writing and spelling in an undertone. Mammy and Pappy Bradley sat on opposite sides of the fireplace, watching the last few embers of the fire whiten into ashes. It was a beloved little chair Mam my Bradley sat in—a rocker with a splithickory seat. Carl had made it the winter before he went away "fur soldierin'." As she rocked she seemed to be looking at something far away-something the others couldn't see. Perhaps it was a group of stretcher-bearers miring around ankle-deep in that pasty French mud, trying to get a wounded boy to a near-by dressing-station as painlessly as possible. The wounded boy was her own sonPrivate Carl Bradley. The ground was littered with canteens and rations, for Carl had been hit while "hawlin' vittals fur his pardners." The stretcher-bearers stumbled through the darkness; they did the best they could, cursing the mud, the sink-holes, and the wire, but Carl-Carl went west before they got him to the dressing-station. "Yep, if it be true that them fellers as hires revenuers wuz in cahoots on the war-them an' us is even. Sam'l Bradley, do you hear, we're even!" Sam'l Bradley was asleep. Oh, Johnnie, when you goin' to marry me—tell I'll marry you by the light o' the moon; if the Oh, Johnnie, when you goin' to go to town, tell I'll go to town by the light o' the moon; if the Oh, Johnnie, when you goin' to cook your mash, tell me, Johnnie, tell me Johnnie, do. Oh, Sally, when you goin' to cook your mashtell me, Sally, tell me Sally, do. I'll cook my mash by the light o' the moon, if Oh, Johnnie, when you goin' to cook your mash, the moon stays dark, I'll cook it soon, tell me, Johnnie, tell me Johnnie, do. Sing a Song of Jazz BY VALMA CLARK Author of "The Director's Brother," "Candlelight Inn," etc. ILLUSTRATIONS BY HARVÉ STEIN NGELA paused on the great staircase, and with a bare white arm cooling itself against the mahogany rail, looked down at the gathering of the Ladies' Betterment League which was filling her grandmother's three huge parlors. There were the sheen of restless silks and the gabble of many voices. The ladies had chosen this New Year's Eve of 1921 to initiate a cleanup programme in the town; and, congregated here in their holiday best, they were awaiting the returns. Angela's moving eye collected the entire assemblage with scorn. At the spectacle of Peter Harned making himself agreeable to that little busybody, Mrs. Alvah Hutchins, her gaze paused. Couldn't gram pull even a hen party without including Peter to rustle chairs and tote trays? Bah! It was Peter-Peter-too much Peter! "The Black Horse Tavern first," came Mrs. Carmody's bass voice, drowning out the lighter chatter. "To have a place like that open in the same county with our daughters our granddaughters-is contamination! I told Sheriff Hilton to report to me here directly after the raid." She stood in a little space respectfully cleared for her. A stationary figure in a rich brocaded black velvet, with a diamond brooch at her throat and a gold watch on her flat bosom, with a bony, firm face darkly moustached, she seemed the pivot for their pattern of shifting and excitable femininity. That nervous little Miss Trask in nose-glasses and purple changeable silk was her right-elbow woman. Peter first, then the others, discovered Angela. She stood, a little slim girl, with her pale, pointed face cast down, and with a sheen upon her smooth flaxen hair. In her yellow-sashed dress with the clusters of old-fashioned nosegays-tight pink moss buds encircled with forget-menots-and with a tiny wreath of the same innocent flowers about her hair, Angela was the perfect picture of an old lady's nineteenth-century conception of what a young girl should be. No one could look more demure, more truly angelic, than this little nineteen-year-old, twentiethcentury heiress of the Carmody wealth. But this impression was false, as all of Holly knew. To correct it, Angela had only to fling up her eyes-dark, glowing, passionate eyes with yellow glints of life and laughter in them. "Well, well-come down, if you're coming!" boomed her grandmother, voicing the strain. Angela strolled. All of them-all of these old ladieswere feeling the danger, the thin ice of her mood... were watching her with a ghoulish expectancy for what she might do. Angela came slowly, groping for deviltry. Between her and Peter, the mistletoe, planted there by her matchmaking elder for the Christmas salute! Peter had made nothing from her, on that private occasion, by her grandmother's forethought; no, not even his gift of a chipped-diamond bar pin had melted Angela. But now, on this public occasion Suddenly Angela's little slim person became animate with mischief. She did a glissando on her slippered feet across the waxed floor to Peter . . . caught him by the bow-tie of his dress-suit, and pulled him down-half-a-league down, the hulking brute! She half-giggled the kiss against his honest surprise, against the sudden flaming red of his face. He caught her, tight and hard-whew! "That will do, Angela," said the bass voice drily. But her grandmother was not outraged. So fatuous she was in her approval of Peter-faugh! The ladies were simpering. Probably the only proper shock she, Angela, had ever pulled-this abandoned affection of an engaged girl for her fiancé. Her error! She screwed a nasty face at Peter, pivoted on a sharp, yellow satin heel. "Angela! Where are you going?" "To tune up, gram." She slipped into the fourth parlor-the sacred front one-and closed the door behind her. It was chilly in here. The four plaster heads of angels, which gazed down, in high relief, from the four corners of the ceiling, looked like death. A winter moon was on the portraits of the ladies of the family . . . and on the baize-covered symbol of their sacrifice, which occupied a central place in the room. There it stood had always stood never in its inanimate life removed from the shrine of these four walls. Angela switched on lights, jerked off the cover from the great golden harp. The tradition-the inviolable tradition of the Carmody family. Master-not servant of the Carmody women. Every daughter of the house must play it. They had started her at five, with an ancient music-master who travelled down to her from Rochester. He had rapped on her knuckles with a sharp pencil when she plucked too fast. Memories of the long hours of compulsory practice, golden hours of childhood when she had been shut in alone with only that gilded object for a companion, crowded Angela. The terrible despotism that stringed thing had exercised over all her life! She would never be free-really free until she could subdue it. . . . She seated herself. Angela never looked more like a little flaxen-haired saint than when she was bending to her harp. As docile she appeared as her great-grandmother, Charity Parkman, who was painted in currant-colored velvet, with the blond cap and bertha of the late eighteen-forties, in an attitude of subservience to this same harp. Angela squinted narrowly at the portrait of her great-grandmother. The lady had refused a concert career to play exclusively for her husband. Had she ever regretted? ... Angela's grandmother, next in line, painted as a gentle-faced young girl-before she had grown iron character and a moustache-all in that softest "mikado" gray of the seventies, with deep falls of lace, and with her dark hair dressed in curls. The harp was, of course, the object of her pictured devotion-the harp was the star figure in each of these por traits! Persis Carmody had, by her own report, proudly refused to play publicly even in church. . . . And her own mother, Gretchen of the original flaxen hair, done in the cream-white satin with point lace and pearl beads which was her wedding-dress in 1900. Her mother was long dead now, but the face in the portrait had great spirit, and the story was that she had taken less kindly to the harp, upon her marriage to young Philip Carmody, than his mother might have wished. Did her initials, "G.C.," stabbed into the gilt of the harp, express something of the young wife's rebellion against the tyranny of her mother-in-law? . . . Or were they all sweetly, gently compliant to the tradition? In all that galaxy of harp devotees, hadn't she any support at all? Was the rebel spirit really something new-something wholly modern? But now the door grated open. Peter! He said abruptly: "Why did you do that? Out there?" "Wh-what-? Why, Peter Harned, d'you mean you didn't want me- -?" "You only did it before a crowd! You wouldn't have done it if there hadn't been a crowd! That's all our engagement means to you-just a spectacle "I can't help it," said Angela, "because I grew up being engaged to you. Any time you want to call it off-" She struck three chords, and sang in tones of mild resignation: "Child of sin and sorrow, filled with dismay, Wait not for to-morrow, yield thee to-day "Angie, honey, I didn't mean!" "Refreshments first," came the seep of a voice through the half-open door;" then the concert by the little Carmody girl. It's still only ten o'cl—” "Can you simply bear it?" whispered Angela. "The same old ditties that they were warbling twenty-forty-sixty years ago. Shades of the old sweet melodiescan't you hear them echoing here? Don't you s'pose that she-my great-grandmother Parkman up there-might have sneaked in Champagne Charley, or some of those old rough ones-at least when she was alone? And what do you s'pose would happen if I ripped into something new-really new, to-night? No-I've too much life to endure Peter came close to her, as though irresistibly drawn. He made a stumbling effort of words: "I-I understand! You're like the steam in a plugged exhaust pipe, and you've got to find an outlet or blow up the works. I-if you can only put up with me-like me a littleI'd never block the way. There'd be a free exit to-to any damn place you wanted to go there ever any use to argue with me? "The the harp? But my God, Angie, But he had reached her, his arms were about her, closing as though to crush out of her the wilfulness. "You can't! Angie! You won't-I can't bearAngela, within his fierce hold, was you can't— queerly passive. "It's no use. Please, Peter, they'll see!" "But you kissed me then-just a few minutes back "It's not then-it's now! I tell you it's off. Sh! what are they saying?' "The Black Horse Tavern, my dear, but not till midnight "Do you move me, or do I move myself? It's pretty tall for me." "But wh-what's the idea? My God, Angie, I can't-you can't- Why, it'd be as much as my life's worth for me to take that harp out of your grandmother's house!" Angela looked from Peter to the harp. "Peter, which is the Black Horse Seven little devils of cool calculation were Tavern?" dancing in her brown eyes. She came "The Ridge Road. But seriously, back to the spectacle of Peter's souldearagony. "Will you shake a leg!" "Listen, Peter, have you got your car here?" She had wriggled entirely away from him. "At the front of the house-why?" he asked, stopped by the sudden sharp purpose in her voice. .. Twenty minutes later the hilarious, smoky atmosphere of the Black Horse Tavern's main dining-room was invaded by a princess in an ermine wrap, and a boy in a coon-skin coat who lugged a great baize-covered object. It was between dances. A burly man at a near-by table glanced up, paused in the act of pouring out another from a hip flask, and addressed his Titian-haired companion: "Say, ain't that that little Carmody devil and her boy-friend-and-what th' hell?” "There's a last thing," said Angela, "which I think you can do for me. Wait -wait right here!" She was almost instantly back, with the ermine evening wrap, which had been her grandmother's Christmas gift to her, trailing the floor. She was incandescent with excitement. "Coast's clear-they've adjourned to the mess-hall. Now's our chance." "But where? You don't mean- -the vivid questioning. . . . She moved diBlack Horse Tavern!" "Right." Angela stepped past him, past other glances of inquiry, amazed recognition, rect to the little hovering, pouter-pigeon figure of a man, who was clearly the "But you're not planning for me to proprietor. "Table, madam?" take you -?" "Right, again." "Is that all of the orchestra?" she asked, with a nod toward the five males who occupied the platform. "Fagan's Jazz Band, from Syracuse," he assured her. "You need a harp. Will you boost me up?” |