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Show /<?o had taken a clownish pratt-fall. "Just take it easy," he said. "You've had a shock; it'll look a lot different in the morning." "With a Hollywood sunrise?" she said bitterly. He smiled. "I'll arrange one." "Nobody can arrange anything," she said hoarsely, in despair. "Oh?" he said. "Look at Myrdal," he said, "look at all the people who've done things diat mattered." "How?" she said, watching him like she would a Baptist preacher, coldly unconvinced. "You, for example. You've come all this way from Texas. And if you are good, then the world is better." "How?" she asked again. The question sat there like a patient buzzard; she watched him look at it. "Tell Negroes that," she said. "Go on over in the slums and tell them how much better off they are because of me. But tell them too how I was feeling there in the dorm. I didn't mention diat, how shocked I was a Negro should dare to try to touch me. And that racist cop bastard I told you about, he's the one I wanted to tell that that guy was a Negro. To tell him to sic'em. He would have all right." Milt sagged, tired and impatient. "You mean catch him, that one guy, when you couldn't even identify him?" "No. But I knew the cops would use that as an excuse to haul in all the Negro men they could just to work them over. That's what I wanted." "Crap. Why didn't you tell him then?" "I wanted to-that's what counts!" "The hell it does." But she looked at him with such dead miserable eyes that his voice raised, passionate to help her. "Can't you see!" he cried out to her. "Just when you're most shocked, just when all your southern white past is coming out, then you chose for him!" But she lowered her head, holding herself tightly against the wave of self-disgust which turned in her stomach and rose up in her throat. She had met herself all right, and she closed her eyes even to the room, to the modern lamp bought to show their good taste in objects, the brick and board bookcases to show their contempt for objects, books to show their intellect, not marrying to show they weren't middle-class, a Picasso to show they were artistic. Though "The Old Guitarist" was a cliche" around the University, she had chosen it anyhow for 174 |