A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      KINGSBLOOD ROYAL (1947)
Author:     Sinclair Lewis
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      KINGSBLOOD ROYAL (1947)
Author:     Sinclair Lewis



1


Mr. Blingham, and may he fry in his own cooking-oil, was assistant
treasurer of the Flaver-Saver Company.  He was driving from New
York to Winnipeg, accompanied by Mrs. Blingham and their horrible
daughter.  As they were New Yorkers, only a business trip could
have dragged them into this wilderness, and they found everything
west of Pennsylvania contemptible.  They laughed at Chicago for
daring to have skyscrapers and at Madison for pretending to have a
university, and they stopped the car and shrieked when they entered
Minnesota and saw a billboard advertising "Ten Thousand Lakes."

Miss Blingham, whom they called "Sister," commented, "Unless you
had a New York sense of humor, you would never be able to
understand why that sign is so funny!"

When they came to their first prairie hamlet in Minnesota, six
cottages, a garage, a store and a tall red grain elevator, Mrs.
Blingham giggled, "Why, they've got an Empire State Building here!"

"And all the Svensons and Bensons and Hensons go up to the Rainbow
Room every evening!" gurgled Sister.

Their laughter buoyed them for a hundred miles, till it was time to
think of lunch.  Miss Blingham looked at the map.  "Grand Republic,
Minnesota.  That seems to be about forty miles from here, and it's
quite a village--85,000 people."

"Let's try it.  They ought to have some sort of a hotel to eat at,"
yawned Mr. Blingham.

"All the best people there eat at the Salvation Army Shelter!"
yelped Mrs. Blingham.

"Oh, you slay me!" said Sister.

When, from the bluffs of the Sorshay River, they looked down to the
limestone shaft of the Blue Ox National Bank Building and the
welter of steel and glass sheds that had been erected for the
Wargate Wood Products Corporation since 1941, Mr. Blingham said,
"Fair-sized war plant they got there."

Since the beginning of World War II, Grand Republic had grown from
85,000 to 90,000.  To some ninety thousand immortal souls, it was
the center of the universe, and all distances were to be measured
from it; Moscow was defined as a place 6,100 miles from Home, and
Saudi Arabia as a market for Wargate wallboard and huts and
propellers.  The Blinghams, who knew that the true center of the
solar system is the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh
Street, would have been irritated to find out how many of the
simpletons in the valley below them believed that New York
contained nothing but hotels, burlesque shows, a ghetto and Wall
Street.

Mrs. Blingham urged, "Come on.  We can't waste all day looking at
this dump.  The hotel-guide gives the Pineland as the best place
for chow.  Let's try it."

They did not notice them, but on the way to the Pineland they must
have passed scrollwork palaces of 1880, an Italian Catholic Church,
a pawn-shop in which a Lithuanian lumberjack had recently pawned
the Luger pistol with which he had murdered a Siamese mining-camp
cook, the best women's dress-shop between Fort William and Dallas,
a Victoria Cross aviator, and a Negro clergyman who was a Doctor of
Philosophy.

In front of the tapestry-brick, nine-storied Hotel Pineland
(designed by Lefleur, O'Flaherty, and Zipf of Minneapolis), Mr.
Blingham said doubtfully, "Well, I suppose we can get SOME kind of
grub here."

They thought it very funny that the more choosy of the two
restaurants in the Pineland should presumptuously be named "The
Fiesole Room," though they would not have found it funny if they
had known that locally it was pronounced "Feesoly," because that
was how the Blinghams pronounced it, also.

The Fiesole Room had, for cinquecento atmosphere, Pompeian-red
walls, majolica dishes, a Spanish wine-jar on either side of the
doorway, and a frieze of antique Grecian runners done by a local
portrait-painter.

"My, my, don't they put on the dog in--what's the name of this town
again?" mocked Sister.

"Grand Rapids," said Mr. Blingham.

"No, that's the furniture, where Aunt Ella comes from.  This," said
Mrs. Blingham authoritatively, after looking at the map, "is Grand
Republic."

"What a silly name!" pronounced Sister.  "Sounds like Fourthajuly.
Oh, God, these hicks!"

They were elaborately escorted to a table by the headwaiter, a
dignified, erect colored man whose head resembled a brown billiard
ball.  They did not know that he was Drexel Greenshaw, the leader
of the conservative wing of the Negro Community.  He looked like a
bishop, like a general, like a senator, any of whom he might have
been if he had chosen another calling than table-waiting and
another color.

Mr. Blingham had the Hungarian goulash.  Mrs. Blingham was bold in
the matter of roast lamb.  Sister took the chicken salad, snapping
at the colored waiter, "And do try to have a little chicken in it,
will yuh?"

They found it highly comic that the waiter bowed, and said, "Yes,
Miss."  They could not have explained why they found it comic.  As
they said, "You have to be a New Yorker to understand our Sense of
Humor.  A nigger hash-hustler in a dump like this making like he
was at the Ritz!"

It is true that in New York, on their evenings of festival, they
did not dine at the Ritz but at a Schrafft's.

Toying delicately with her chicken salad, but finishing all of it
as well as all the rolls, Sister looked cynically about the Fiesole
Room.

"Mm, mm!  Respected parents, will you look at the table to my
right?  Please buy him for me--the young one."

The person whom she had thus favored was an amiable man of thirty
with solid shoulders and freckled paws and the clear skin that
often goes with red hair like his.  You thought of football, later
tempered by tennis.  But what you most noticed was the singular
innocence of his blue eyes and the innocence and enthusiasm of his
smile.

"He looks like a Scotch army officer," approved Sister.  "He ought
to be wearing kilts."

"Sister!  And he looks to me like a shoe-clerk," sniffed Mrs.
Blingham.

With that, they forgot the young man, who was neither a shoe-clerk
nor more than a quarter Scotch.  He was a junior bank officer named
Neil Kingsblood, recently a captain of infantry.

On their way north, after lunch, the Blinghams got off their proper
route.  They were too proud to ask questions of the barbaric
natives, and they circled through the expensive residence district
of Ottawa Heights and a new, gray-shingle and stucco and asphalt-
roof and picture-window real-estate development called Sylvan Park.
As they turned from Linden Lane upon Balsam Trail, they did not
note a "colonial cottage," new and neat and painty, with broad
white clapboards and blue shutters, on the northwest corner; nor
did they look at the brisk and handsome young woman and the four-
year-old girl, all pink and pale gold, who were coming out of the
cottage.  Yet this was the house of Captain Neil Kingsblood, and
these were his wife, Vestal, and Biddy, his lively daughter.

"I guess we'll have to ask the way.  Do you s'pose the folks out
here speak English?" said Mrs. Blingham irritably.

That evening, as they were approaching Crookston, where they were
to spend the night, Mr. Blingham mused, "What was the name of that
burg where we had lunch today--where we got lost, leaving town?"

"Funny, I can't remember it," said Mrs. Blingham.  "Big River or
something."

"Where the good-looking young man was," said Sister.



2


Neil and Vestal Kingsblood were having an amount of servant trouble
that seemed improbable with so tolerant a couple, and it was not
entirely a comedy of domestic mishaps.  Tragedy in wry forms may
come even to the Colonial Residence of a Young Banker.

You would have said of Neil Kingsblood that he would not encounter
either tragedy or remarkable success.  Red-headed, curly-headed,
blue-eyed, stalwart, cheerful, and as free of scholarship as he was
of malice, Neil was, in November, 1944, an assistant cashier in the
Second National Bank of Grand Republic, of which Mr. John William
Prutt was president.

He was devoted to his family, his friends, his job, to shooting and
fishing and golf, and to the guns, rods, canoes and other enchanting
and childish objects associated with those sports.  But he was now
unfitted for excursions among the forests and lakes of Northern
Minnesota.  A year ago, when he was a captain of infantry, his right
leg had been wrecked in the capture of an Italian village.

That leg would always be half an inch shorter than the other, but
he could limp briskly now, and by spring of 1945, he was sure, he
would be able to hitch about the court in a sort of tennis.  The
limp did not damage his position as one of the best-looking men in
town; it gave an almost humorous lurch to his gait, and his chest
and arms were as powerful as ever.

Last Christmas he had spent in agony in an army hospital in
England; this Christmas, he would be with his beloved Vestal, a
tall, gay, affectionate but sensible matron, and his daughter
Elizabeth, aged four and always known as "Biddy"--the enchanting,
the good-tempered Biddy, with her skin of strawberries and cream,
her hair like champagne.

Neil was born in 1914, during the fever-symptoms of the First World
War; he had believed in the sanctity of the Second World War; and
over highballs at the Sylvan Park Tennis Club, he stated bravely
and he almost believed that there would not be a Third World War
arriving just in time to catch the son whom the benevolent gods
(his God was Baptist and Vestal's was Episcopal) might send them.

His father, still blessedly alive and in practice, was Dr. Kenneth
M. Kingsblood, the popular dentist (office in the Professional and
Arts Building, Chippewa Avenue at West Ramsey Street) and his
maternal grandfather was Edgar Saxinar, retired telephone official
living in Minneapolis.  He had, thus, a scientific and industrial
background, very solid, but it must be owned that for wealth and
social standing, his family could not touch the gentility of
Vestal's father, who was Morton Beehouse, president of the Prairie
Power and Light Corporation, brother of Oliver Beehouse, chief
counsel for the Wargate industries.  In Grand Republic, we say
"Beehouse" as you say Adams or Cecil or Pignatelli.

Vestal had been president of the Junior League, women's golf-
champion of the Heather Country Club, top war-bond saleswoman of
the county, secretary of the St. Anselm's Altar Guild, chairman of
the Program Committee of the Women's Club, and winner of the after-
dinner coffee-set at the Cosmopollies' bridge-tournament.  She was,
however, human.

She was a graduate of Sweet Briar College in Virginia, and it was
understood that she was possessed of rather better taste than Neil,
who had had a boarding-house and beer existence at the University
of Minnesota.  But she said, "I'm no highbrow.  At heart, I'm a
Hausfrau."

Her face was narrow, a bit long, but lightened by humorous gray
eyes, and her hair, of an average chestnut, was remarkably thick.
Her hands were squarer than Neil's, which were strong but tapered
to slender fingers.  Vestal laughed easily and not too much.  She
loved Neil, she respected him, she liked him; she often held his
hand at the movies, and in the bedroom she was serious about him.
She had, before his leg was injured, enjoyed canoeing with him all
through the lonely Border Lakes; and she shared with him his Sound
Conservative Republican Beliefs about banking, taxes, and the
perfidy of labor unions.  They were truly a Happy Young American
Married Couple.



Though she had been reared in a Beehouse mansion of gray stone, in
the old faubourg of Beltrami Avenue, Vestal liked coming home to
the artful simplicities of Sylvan Park.  Here were forests ancient
as the hills enclosing sunny spots of greenery, all laid out in
curves and crescents, regardless of expense, by Mr. William
Stopple, Realtor and Developer.

Vestal was friendly with her own white cottage and the smart semi-
circular stoop and its slim pillars.  Inside, the living-room was
modest enough but bright as a gold purse, with barrel-chairs in
dark-blue corduroy, maroon curtains, a ship's-clock, an ardent
hearth-fire (electric, with glass coals), and on the mantel a
German helmet which Neil was supposed to have captured in combat.
But even more indicative of their prosperity was the "sun-porch,"
with green wicker furniture and red-tile floor and a portable bar
and, for grandeur, a view of the mound on which was "Hillhouse,"
the fabulous residence of Berthold Eisenherz.

No ordinary bank teller could have afforded such richness, and Neil
had been only a teller until a couple of months ago.  His father-
in-law had helped to make this splendor possible, and to enable
them to have a maid of all work, that last and dearest luxury in a
pattern of American civilization in which you own a Cadillac but
black your own shoes; and a sound civilization it is, too, in which
you may bully only the servants that are made of steel.

In Sylvan Park there are none of the brick-walled gardens and
brick-faced chauffeurs which adorn Ottawa Heights.  Neil's
neighbors rejoice in Cape Cod cottages, seven-room chalets, and
plain wooden boxes with fake half-timbering.  Along the halfmoon
Lanes and Trails are fountains, and the chief square, named "The
Carrefour," is surrounded by smart shops with illegitimate Spanish
arcading.  But all over this plaster Granada children are
passionately running, mothers are wheeling baby-carriages, and
fathers are raking leaves.

Mr. William Stopple (and remember that not long ago he was mayor of
Grand Republic) privately advises you that Sylvan Park is just as
free of Jews, Italians, Negroes, and the exasperatingly poor as it
is of noise, mosquitoes, and rectangularity of streets.  Publicly,
he announces:


"WHERE are boyhood's dreams and the maiden's fancy, where are old-
time romance and the lily-white maid beside the mirroring pool
under the shadow of the castle tower flying its gallant gonfalon?
YOU can recapture that dream today.  Sylvan Park is where gracious
living, artistic landscaping, the American Way of Life, and up-to-
the-minute conveniences are exemplified in Dream o' Mine Come True,
at surprisingly reasonable prices and liberal terms, phone or
write, two offices, open 'til 'ten P.M. Wedns.'"


Neil and Vestal jeered at this true modern poetry, but they did
consider Sylvan Park a paradise and a highly sensible paradise--and
their house was almost paid for.

Back of their own double bedroom (it had a tiled bathroom adorned
with seahorses and lotos blossoms) was Biddy's apartment, bunnies
and Mickey Mouses, and behind that a coop, all angles and eaves,
with things tucked behind other things, which they called Neil's
"den," and which could serve as guest-room.  Here Neil came to
gloat over his rods and clubs, the Arrowhead Rifle Marksmanship
Cup, which he had won in 1941, and his beloved collection of guns.
He had a Hudson's-Bay trade rifle, a .45 automatic pistol which had
belonged to the Royal Mounted, and half a dozen contemporary
rifles.  He had always wanted to be a frontiersman, an Astor
Company trader of 1820 on the Minnesota border, and he liked
calendars portraying canoemen and the habits of the moose.

And here were his own not-very-numerous books.  The set of Kipling,
the set of O. Henry, the set of Sherlock Holmes, a history of
banking, and the bound volumes of the National Geographic Magazine,
with Beasley on tennis and Morrison on golf.  Among these solid
wares, pushed back on a shelf, was a volume of Emily Dickinson,
which a girl, whose name and texture he had now forgotten, had
given to him in college, and sometimes Neil picked at it and
wondered.



The rooms to which they gave the most nervous care were at the end
of a constricted hall: the bedroom and private bath of their maid,
Miss Belfreda Gray, a young lady of color.

In the hope of keeping a maid at all in these war days, they had
made Belfreda's suite as pretty as they could afford.  The bedroom
was complete with radio, candlewick spread, and copies of Good
Housekeeping, and in an entirely insane moment, Vestal had bought a
real English loofah for the bathroom.  Belfreda had considered it
some form of mummified bug, and had almost quit when Vestal
presented it to her.

Also, Belfreda declined to use the cake of pink bathsoap, in the
shape of a duck, which Vestal provided, explaining that her dark
skin was delicate and she could tolerate only Gout de Rose, at a
dollar a cake. . . .  Vestal got that for her, too, and still
Belfreda thought about quitting.  She was a good cook, when she
wanted to be, but just now she did not want to be.

Belfreda was twenty-one, and beautiful in her slim elastic way.
She firmly preferred not to wear stockings, even when waiting on
table, and her voluptuous legs of warm, satin-finished bronze, not
much concealed by her flirting skirts, bothered Neil and his
masculine visitors continually, though they didn't do anything
about it.

It is to be feared that, after putting more spiritual agony into
holding a maid than it would have taken to do the housework
themselves, Neil and Vestal had a distinct anti-Ethiopian bias in
the matter of Belfreda, along with no very remarkable pro-Semitism
or love for the Hindus, the Javanese, or the Finns.



3


"No," Neil said to Vestal, "I've always considered Mr. Prutt too
conservative.  He thinks that only people like us, from British and
French and Heinie stock, amount to anything.  He's prejudiced
against Scandinavians and the Irish and Hunkies and Polacks.  He
doesn't understand that we have a new America.  Still and all, even
hating prejudice, I do see where the Negroes are inferior and
always will be.  I realized that when I saw them unloading ships in
Italy, all safe, while we white soldiers were under fire.  And
Belfreda expecting to get paid like a Hollywood star--and still
out, at midnight!"

They were having a highball in their wondrous kitchen, with its
white enamel electric stove and refrigerator and dishwasher and
garbage-disposer, seated on crimson metal chairs at the deep-blue
metal table--the Model Kitchen that had replaced the buffalo and
the log cabin as a symbol of America.

It was one of Vestal's nights for being advanced and humanitarian.

"I don't see that, Neil.  I don't see that Belfreda is any more
demanding than these white bobby-soxers that are only fifteen years
old and have to have the family car every evening.  I wouldn't like
it if I had to spend all day in somebody else's kitchen, in the
grease and cabbage-smell.  Would you like it, you bloated
financier?"

"No, I don't guess I would.  But still: private bath, and no six in
a room, like I hear there are in the nigger quarter, on Mayo
Street; chance to sleep quiet and alone.  At least, I hope Belfreda
sleeps alone, but I always wonder about those back stairs.  And a
rest every afternoon from two to four-thirty, just when we're going
crazy in the bank over the books.  Free board and room and eighteen
dollars a week to put away."

"Well, you make eighty!"

"But I've got to support you--and Belfreda!"

"But she tells me she has to help her granddad--you know, that old
colored bootblack at the Pineland, old Wash."

"Oh, I know."  Neil was reasonably tender-hearted.  "She probably
doesn't have much fun, always taking care of some other girl's
baby.  Charley Sayward claims the time will come when nobody will
do domestic work for strangers except as a specialist, at fifty
dollars a week, and go home every night like a banker--or a
plumber.  But I wouldn't like it!  I liked it when the hired girl
worked all week for eight dollars and did the washing and baked
cookies for the little massa--that was me.  Won't it be a hell of a
joke on the returned heroes if all the subject peoples that we
fought to free, GET free, and grab our jobs?  Oh, Vestal, this
world is getting too much for a poor rifleman!"

She had been inspecting a cupboard.  She wailed, "That dratted girl
has gone and made two pies again, to save herself trouble, and the
second one will get soggy before we eat it!  I swear, I'm going to
fire her and do my own work."

"Aren't you busting down in your defense of the downtrodden?"

"Grrrr!  Let's take a look at her room, while she's out."

Feeling like spies, they tiptoed upstairs and into Belfreda's
boudoir.  Her bed was not made--it never was made--and over it were
scattered shoes and pink-ribboned underwear and movie magazines,
and the pillow was black with hair-grease.  Upon her Bible, on the
night-table, was a pamphlet labeled, "High John the Conqueror Magic
Catalogue:  Lodestones, Hoodoo Bags, Jickey Perfume, Mo-Jo Salts,
Adam and Eve Roots, Ancient Seal of Shemhamforas."  An odor of
incense and perfume was solid in the room.

"And it was such a sweet room when we gave it to her," mourned
Vestal.

"Let's get out of this.  I feel as if we were in a conjuh den and
somebody's likely to sneak out from under the bed and start
cutting."

As they came to the head of the back stairs, Belfreda was skipping
up.  She stopped to stare at them, malevolently.

"Oh, uh--good evening," said Neil, with a sound of guilt and
idiocy.

Belfreda's face was very dark, with round little cheeks and a mouth
of humor, but it was rigid as she looked at them, and they fled to
their bedroom.

Neil mumbled, "She was plenty sore at our snooping.  Do you suppose
she'll burn a wax image of us?  The lives and ideas of these
niggers are certainly incomprehensible to our kind of people."

"Neil, I think they like you to say 'Negro,' not 'nigger.'"

"Okay, okay!  Anything to oblige.  These Negresses, then."

"But Belfreda says that 'Negress' is the one word that you must
never use."

"Oh, for God's sake!  Why are all these--uh--Negroes so touchy?
What difference does it make what they're called?  As I say: we
don't know where Belfreda goes or what she does--rug-cutting or
witchcraft or maybe she belongs to some colored leftwing political
gang that's planning to take this house away from us.  One thing is
obvious: the whole biological and psychological make-up of the
Negroes is different from that of white people, especially from us
Anglo-Saxons (course I have some French blood, too).

"It's too bad, but you have to face facts and it's evident that the
niggers--all right, the Negroes--don't quite belong to the same
human race with you and me and Biddy.  I used to laugh at the
Southern fellows in the Army who said that, but I guess they were
right.  Look at that trapped-animal glare that Belfreda gave us.
Still, I'm glad that in the North there's no discrimination against
'em--going to the same public schools with our own white kids.
Some day I suppose Biddy might have a desk right next to a little
pickaninny."

"I don't know that it will hurt that little snob particularly!"
sniffed Vestal.

"No, no, sure it won't, as long as it's only in school, but how
would you like it if your own daughter married a Negro?"

"Well, so far, even at the enticing age of four, I don't notice
that she's bothered by any very big gang of dusky suitors!"

"Sure--sure--I just mean--I mean--"

The struggle of the honest and innocent Neil to express his racial
ideas was complicated by the fact that he had no notion what these
ideas were.

"I mean, up North here, we been proceeding on the idea that a Negro
is just as good as we are and has just as much chance to be
President of the United States.  But maybe we've been on the wrong
track.

"I met a doctor from Georgia in the Army, and he assured me--and
good Lord, he certainly ought to know, he's lived down there among
the darkies all his life, and him a doctor and a scientist--and he
told me that it's been proven that all Negroes have smaller brain-
capacity than we have, and the sutures in their skulls close up
earlier, so even if they start well in school, pretty soon they
drop out and spend the rest of their lives loafing, and if that
isn't inferior--Oh, nuts!  I guess the fact is I hate to hate
anybody.  I never hated the Italians or the Krauts, but I do hate
Belfreda.  Damn her, she's always laughing at me, right here in our
own house.  Doing as little as she can and getting as much as she
can out of us, and sneering at us for giving it to her; never
taking any pride in cooking decent meals, but just thinking how
many evenings she can get off, and always watching us, and
snickering at us and trying to get something on us, hating us!"

He meditated, after Vestal had gone to sleep:

--That colored fellow in my class all through school--what was his
name?--Emerson Woolcape, was it?--he always seemed quiet and decent
enough and yet it always irritated me to see that black face of his
among all the nice white girls.

--Come to think of it, his face wasn't black.  It was as fair as
mine; we'd 've all thought he was white if they hadn't TOLD us he
was part Negro.  Still and all, when you knew that, you THOUGHT of
him as being black, and it made you sore to see him showing off and
answering questions when Judd and Eliot had failed on 'em.

--Those black roustabouts in uniform in Italy--I never really
talked to any of 'em, but they always seemed so different--the
standoffish way they stared at us--I wouldn't 've stood for a
three-star general looking at me like those boogies did.  Yessir,
if we want to preserve our standards of civilization, we got to be
firm and keep the niggers in their place.  Though I guess I'm not
so hot in being firm with Belfreda, the little monkey!



The great young banker-warrior, legitimate heir of the sword-
swallowers of Dumas, the princely puzzlers of Tolstoy, the brave
young gentlemen of Kipling, twisted in bed, not altogether happy.



4


They were finding again the Christmas spirit that had been lost
through the war years.  All of his intimates were still fighting in
Europe or the Pacific, and it was as much for the thought of them
as for Biddy that Neil and Vestal bustled all over town, buying a
Christmas tree a full month early.

They hoped to have Belfreda as a sweet and trusting member of the
Yuletide family, and Vestal throbbed at her, "Mr. Kingsblood and I
have already found the jolliest tree, and the expressman is
bringing it here tonight.  We'll keep it in the garage.  Wouldn't
you like to help us--you know, make a little ceremony of it?  The
tree is just as much for you as it is for us, of course."

"We got our own tree, at home."

"Oh, do you have Christmas trees on Mayo Street?"

"Yes, we got Christmas trees on Mayo Street!  And we got families
on Mayo Street!"

Vestal was more furious with herself than with the girl.  She
perceived that she had been assuming that Christmas was a holiday
invented by the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth, along with Santa Claus
and yule-logs and probably the winter solstice, and must all be
delightful novelties to persons of African descent.  She stuttered:

"Yes, I meant--I didn't mean--I just thought it might amuse you--"

Belfreda said airily, "No, thanks.  I'm going out with my boyfriend
this evening," and she departed, leaving Vestal and Neil flat in
the kitchen which they had once loved, but which Belfreda had
turned into an alien and hostile cave.

"Oh, let's get out of here!  The place reeks of her," Neil raged.
"Yes, I've got so I hate to come in here.  She acts as if I were an
intruder--as though I was going to snoop into the refrigerator and
see if she keeps it clean."

"Well, you do.  And she doesn't."

"What gets me is the way she just looks at you, if you ask her to
do anything unusual.  She always does what you tell her, but she
always makes you think she's going to refuse, and then you wonder
what you'll do--fire her or apologize.  Oh, dear!"

Neil boasted, "I've got so I can laugh off that look, but what gets
me is the way she never empties all the ash-trays.  By God, she'll
leave one of them dirty, even if it kills her.  I'll bet she makes
a memo to do it."

"That doesn't worry me as much as that sullen look, as though she's
going to get out a razor."

"I believe the ice pick is preferred now, by the better smokes,"
said Neil.  "Oh, I'm sorry.  That sounds snooty.  Poor Belfreda--
dirty dishes all day.  We've got a phobia on the dinges."

But after dinner, the next evening, Neil again viewed with alarm:

"We've got to do something about our Topsy.  Maybe it's time to
fire her.  That was the worst meal she's ever given us.  She
managed to fry the meat hard as leather and--I thought all zigs
were wonderful at sweet potatoes, to which they're believed to be
related, but she does something to them that makes 'em taste like
squash.  And I swear, this is the fourth time this week she's given
us that same pudding."

"Second.  But I do hope I can persuade her to do something
different for the Havocks tomorrow evening.  I dislike Curtiss so
much that we simply have to give him a wonderful spread."

For the preparation of that wonderful spread, Belfreda did do
something different.  She failed to appear at all.



Curtiss, son of the lusty contractor, Boone Havock, had always been
a mistake.  He had probably been confused in the cradle by the
boisterousness of his father, the screaming humor of his mother.
He was a large lout, good-looking in a sulky way, and he had a
large allowance, but he had never been popular with the girls whose
love he had tried to buy or the boys with whom he sought
companionship in boozing.

In the single month of January, 1942, Curtiss had married Nancy
Pzort, who came from a family of inconsiderable market-gardeners,
their daughter, Peggy, had been born, and Curtiss had run off to
join the Marines.  When he was invalided out, as a corporal, his
father, though he noisily disapproved of HIS son's having married a
dollarless Slav, arranged for Curtiss a makeshift job in the Blue
Ox National Bank, and bought for the young couple a fancy villa of
stucco and green tiles, next-door to Neil.

As a veteran of four, Biddy considered the Havocks' Peggy, at two
and three-quarters, a mere child, but they played together all day.
Curtiss assumed that as a fellow-banker and old schoolmate, Neil
must love him and desire to listen to his damp stories about
chasing stenographers.  Curtiss was, in fact, a nuisance.

He dropped in at any time from before breakfast to after midnight,
expecting coffee, expecting a highball, expecting an audience, and
Neil and Vestal were so annoyed by him that they were extra careful
to be cordial.  And they were sorry for little Nancy Pzort Havock,
that poor child of nature inducted into a family of bank-robbers.

The Kingsbloods were having the Curtiss Havocks in for dinner, this
mid-December evening.

Vestal looked forward to it calmly and resolutely.  She went to the
market for squabs, chestnuts, and mushrooms, and on the morning of
the ordeal, she begged of Belfreda, in the manner of a new captain
addressing an old top-sergeant, "Look, uh, honey, I'll be away for
lunch--just give Biddy her cereal.  Now see if you can't run up a
dinner that'll knock the Havocks' eyes out tonight.  You'll have
all day for it.  Use the good silver and the lace tablecloth."

Belfreda only nodded, and Vestal went off merrily.  Neil would come
home by bus; it was her day to have the car; and she was a gallant
spectacle as she sped to the Women's Club for bridge-luncheon.

She won.

She went with Jinny Timberlane out to the Judge's smart house in
the Country Club District.  Jinny had a new moleskin winter suit
that was a sight worth traveling for, and Vestal did not go home
till after six.  She hoped that Belfreda would have the table set
as well as the squabs cleaned, and that Biddy would be lenient with
a tardy mother.

She bounced into a curiously still house that smelled empty.  No
one answered her "Oo-hoo!" and there was no one upstairs,
downstairs, in the kitchen.  The squabs remained nakedly in the
refrigerator, and on the kitchen table was a note in Belfreda's
writing, which was the smooth machine-made script of a business-
college:

"My grandpa sick, I had to go to him, I took Biddy to Grandma
Kingsblood's, maybe back this evening, Belfreda."

Vestal said one brief and extraordinarily unladylike word and went
into action.  She telephoned to Neil's sister, Joan, to bring the
baby over, she vaulted into working dress, she cleaned the squabs
and mixed the dressing.  When Neil came in, she said only, "The
dinge has walked out on us for the evening.  I knew she was a tart.
Set the table.  The vulgar lace cloth and all the agony."

His long and freckled hands were deft, and he did a worthy job,
calling to her, "When I get fired, we can hire out as cook and
butler."

"Yes, and don't think we may not have to, if these Democrats and
Communists keep on jacking up the income tax."

Curtiss and Nancy Havock came in, screaming, at five minutes to
seven.  If they were late for everything else, they were always a
little beforetime for drinks.  That good-natured wench, Nancy,
dipped the French-fried sweet potatoes into the kettle of fat,
while Curtiss volunteered to mix the cocktails, which was
unfortunate, as his favorite recipe was ninety per cent. gin, five
per cent. vermouth, and five per cent. white mule.  By the time
they sat down, not later than twenty-five minutes past seven,
Curtiss was already full of jollity and viciousness.

"You got to fire that nigger tonight.  I always told you they were
dogs.  If you don't whip 'em, they don't respect you.  God, I hate
the whole black mess of 'em.  I know a fellow from Washington
that's right on the inside, and he claims Congress is going to
bring back slavery.  That would be the smartest thing they ever
done.  Wouldn't I like to see one of these nigger college
professors sent back to making cotton, and laid over a barrel and
getting fifty lashes if he bellyached!"

"Nuts, you got mixed up," said his wife genially.  "What the fellow
said was, the big guns in Congress are thinking about moving all
the darkies to Africa.  That would be a dandy idea."

Curtiss was sufficiently plastered now to scream at his wife, "So
I'm a liar, am I, you little Polack bitch!"

Neil heaved up his great shoulders, preparing to remark, "Havock,
I'd like to have you shut up and go home," but Nancy was rather
pleased by such ardent attention, and she crooned, "Why, dearie, I
don't think that's a nice way to talk."  She beamed on Vestal with,
"Yeh, why don't you can the zig?"  (In English, this meant
discharge the Negro.)  "I know where I can get you a hired girl--my
cousin, Shirley Pzort.  She's been working at Wargate's and they
fired her for just necking the least little bit with a foreman."

That wounded Curtiss's ever-present pride of gentility, and he
observed, "Bad enough for you to have a manure-shoveler for a
father and a chippy like Shirley for a cousin, without having her
work as a hash-hustler right next door to us--for the son of a
tooth-jerker!"

Before Neil could say anything, Vestal had them all out in the
kitchen, washing the dishes, and neighborhood amity was preserved,
even at the cost of a platter which Curtiss broke.

It must have been by voodoo and clairvoyance that Belfreda came
flirting in at the second when Neil had wiped the last saucepan.
"Howdy!" she chirruped, and it seemed to Neil that she winked at
Curtiss.  "My granddad was sick.  Sorry.  Well, good night, folks!"

If there was gin on her breath, and there probably was, none of
them was in a condition to know it.  She frisked off to bed without
so much as breaking out the ice-cubes which would obviously be
needed, if Curtiss was to be kept in the state of imbecility
demanded by the Havock idea of hospitality--in their house or
anybody else's.  Neil stared after her, but Vestal warned him with,
"Hush!  After all, she does save me a little work."

"But she expected us to fire her!  She was waiting for it!  She had
a good come-back all ready.  Shame to rob her of the chance.  The
way she gloated--I've got to crack down on her."

"You leave her alone till after the Christmas cheer, if any, and
then I really will hustle and find somebody else," promised Vestal.



5


Always Neil felt that the malign small presence of Belfreda was in
the room, making his large, ruddy, Caucasian strength seem bloated.
When he was shaving, he fancied that she was standing behind him,
snickering.  When he learnedly answered Biddy's questions and
explained to her that God wants us to go to Sunday School (up to
and including age eighteen), he could hear Belfreda's tiny jeer.

And it was this time, when her flea-like insignificance had reduced
his St. Bernard bulk to quivering ridiculousness, that Belfreda
picked out for being a race-conscious crusader.

For years they had had a black cocker spaniel which they had named
"Nigger" without any thought except that black dogs DO get called
Nigger.  He was an imploring, mournful-eyed hound, and Biddy's best
friend--next to Belfreda.

On a snowy evening, with Christmas close, Neil came home from the
bank with cheerfulness.  When Vestal let him in, she stood on the
stoop calling, "Nigger, Nigger, here Nigger, here Nig!"  The dog
dashed up in a complicated and happy waltz and almost upset Biddy
in an excess of affection, while the young parents looked on
fondly.  It was altogether a model family scene, until Belfreda, a
black rose, much too pretty in a much too short black skirt,
remarked from behind them, "I guess you folks just despise all the
colored people, don't you!"

It was the first time that either of them had ever heard a Negro
mention the race; and there was feebleness and embarrassment in
Vestal's plaint, "Why, what do you mean?"

"Calling Nigger, Nigger, Nigger at the front door that way."

"But my dear, it's the dog's name.  Always has been."

"Makes it worse, calling a DOG that.  We colored people don't like
the word 'nigger,' and when you act like dogs and us are just the
same--"

Neil was angry.  "All right, all right, we'll change it!  Anything
to please you!  We'll call the mutt 'Prince'!"

Untouched by the effort at sarcasm, blissful in her missionary
zeal, Belfreda granted, "That'll be nice," and sailed off, while
the prancing Biddy, a flitting white moth of a child, yelped, "I
don't want his name to be changed!  Nigger, Nigger, Nigger!"  Her
chirp made the word so enchanting that her correct parents were
betrayed into smiling, and that was enough; the little prima donna
had a hit, and she knew it.

Though they called after her, she went through the house screaming
"Nigger, Nigger!" while the spaniel followed her fondly, a little
surprised by all this attention to his name but considering it an
excellent idea.

An expressman came with a Christmas package, and Biddy greeted (and
offended) that high Caucasian with a hearty, "Hello, Mr. Nigger!"

"Oh, now, darling, you mustn't use that word!" said Vestal.

Biddy was always willing to co-operate, but this seemed to her a
lot of nonsense.  "Then why do you and Daddy use it?  Why did you
call Nigger 'Nigger'?" she said reasonably, looking friendly but
firm.

"We don't, any more.  We just decided that maybe, after all, it
isn't a pretty word."  Vestal was rather too sweet about it.

"Oh, I think it's a lovely word!" Biddy said with enthusiasm.

Uncle Robert Kingsblood, Neil's older brother, dropped in then for
a free drink, and Biddy yelled at him, "It's Uncle Nigger!"

"What's the big idea!" protested Uncle Robert, while Vestal
insisted, "Biddy!  You stop it now!"  But, thoroughly excited by
this attention, and slightly hysterical, as all good and energetic
children are bound to be at the wrong time, Biddy flashed off to
the kitchen, and in horror they heard her address Belfreda, "Hello,
Miss Nigger!"

To make disaster utterly distraught, they beard Belfreda cackling
with laughter.

They had to explain everything to Brother Robert, who was as
curious as a cat, and about as literate.

He commented on the crisis from his experience as Vice-President in
Charge of Sales of the Osterud Baking Corporation, Makers of
Vitavim Bread, Crisp Crunchy Crusts Jammed with Health and Yumyum:

"You kids want to know how to handle the niggers and not have any
trouble?  I'll tell you how to handle the niggers and not have any
trouble.  At My Firm, we never have any trouble with the niggers,
and we never have to fire them, because we never hire any of 'em in
the first place!  That's the way to handle 'em and not have any
trouble.  See how I mean?  Same time, I don't know as I blame
Belfreda much, getting sore when you called her a nigger right to
her face."

"But Bob, we didn't call her that.  It was the dog that we called
'Nigger,'" Vestal clarified it.

"Well, same principle, ain't it?  The girl got sore, didn't she?
She wouldn't of been here to GET sore if you hadn't never of hired
her in the first place, would she?  That shows the difference in
what we call the inherent mental capacities of the two races.  I
wouldn't never get sore if somebody called ME a nigger.  See how I
mean?  That's the trouble with you two, going to college instead of
getting right into a business career, like I done.  Never hire 'em
in the first place.  So now do I get a drink?"

That was Brother and Uncle Robert Kingsblood, v.p. in c. of s.

At dinner, the Belfreda who had laughed at Biddy's "Miss Nigger"
looked evangelical and unforgiving again, but toward the end of the
meal they heard boisterousness from the kitchen: the giggles of
Belfreda and a masculine barking.

"My, my, what's all this!  I'm going out and get a glass of water,"
alleged Vestal, who had a full glass of water in front of her.  She
scouted into the kitchen.  There, by the gay metal table, standing
upright yet seeming to lounge, was a Negro of perhaps thirty-five.
His color was dark, his hair frizzly, his lips not thin, yet his
nose was a thin blade.  He did not suggest cotton-fields but the
musical comedy, the race track, the sweet shooting of craps; and he
wore bright-blue trousers, a sports-jacket in wide checks, and a
shrimp-colored bow tie.  He had fine hands and the poised shoulders
of a middleweight prizefighter; there was in him an animal beauty
made devilish by his stare at Vestal, a bold and amused stare, as
though he had known every woman from Sappho to Queen Marie and had
understood them all perfectly.  His eyes did not merely undress
Vestal; they hinted that, in a flustered and hateful way, she was
enjoying it.

She was at once saying to herself, "I've never in my life seen such
a circus-clown get-up," and wishing that her substantial Neil could
wear clothes like that and still look romantic.

Belfreda smiled as though they were just girls together, and cooed,
"Oh, Mis' Kingsblood, this is Mr. Borus Bugdoll.  He owns the
Jumpin' Jive Night Club--it's a lovely place.  He's a friend of
mine.  He come to see how I was getting along."

Borus spoke with only the smallest musky taste of Southern Negro
accent.  "I have heard of Mrs. Kingsblood, often.  This is an
honor.  May I hope that it will be repeated?"

"He's laughing his head off at me!" Vestal quaked, and with a
mumbled something which did no especial credit to her intellectual
superiority, she bolted from the kitchen--without the glass of
water.  She grinned at Neil and quavered, not displeased, "I've
just been insulted, I think, and I think the gentleman got away
with it."

"Who's this?  Curtiss?"

"No, a person of color named Borus or Boreas Bugdoll, Mister
Bugdoll, and don't leave out the Mister, or else.  Borus and
Belfreda!  I tell you, the darkies ARE comic!  And what a lie THAT
is!  Don't look now, but I imagine I've just been privileged to
gaze upon the most attractive and horrid heel I ever saw."

"What IS all this?  Some one in the kitchen?" Neil said mildly.

"Now for Heaven's sake, don't be your brother Robert!"

"But who is the brash boy-friend?  I'm going out and take a look."

With Vestal following and in a lively way wondering whether Neil or
Borus would do the murdering, he marched into the kitchen.  But
Borus was gone, and so was Belfreda, and so was the red coupe that
had been parked behind the house, and the dishes lay there in the
sink, miserable and untouched.



Neil's sister, the pleasant Kitty, three years older, had always
been closest to him of the whole family.  She was married to
Charles Sayward, a very decent young lawyer who for a term had been
city attorney.  Kitty and Charles came in this evening, to further
their lifework, which was contract bridge.

Serenely playing, forgetting the horrors of domestic insurrection,
Vestal looked up, late in the evening, to see Belfreda crooking a
finger from the half-darkness of the hall.  Behind her was the
sardonic Borus Bugdoll.

"You back?  What is it?" said Vestal crossly.

"Oh, Mis' Kingsblood, I'm sorry but I got to quit.  Right away.  We
got sickness in the family."

The grim warrior-woman snapped, "You mean quit now, for good, at
this hour, with the dishes unwashed?"

Borus said smoothly, "You might dock her four bits for failing to
do the dishes."

Not Vestal alone but all the others felt uncomfortably that Borus
was laughing at them.

"Oh, I'll wash 'em," Belfreda said sulkily.

"No you won't!  I want you to get out right now, and get out quick.
I'll pay you at once."  Vestal stalked to her little cream-colored
desk and slammed open her efficient small account-book.  "With what
I've advanced you this month deducted, I owe you $63.65, Belfreda.
Oh.  I haven't got that much."

To the bridge-table:  "Anybody got any money?"

From Neil and Charles Sayward, she was able to garner sixty-four
dollars, but they had not enough silver for change.

"You might make it the even sixty-four," purred Borus.

Neil sprang up, full of the most romantic notions about ordering
this bandit out of the house, but as he looked at Borus's amused
ease, it was revealed to him that, for his own sport, this was what
Borus hoped for.

"Good idea.  Make it even," said Neil.  "Good luck, Belfreda.
Good-bye, Mr.--Bugdoll, is it?"

He resolutely moved over, like a small but very select company,
to shake Borus's hand.  There was a moment's trial of strength,
Borus's steel claw against Neil's fist, and then Borus smiled.
Neil liked that smile so much that half a minute passed before he
remembered to be a superior white man and to say, with the grave
courtesy which is the essence of insult, "Would you care to sit
down in the kitchen, Mr. Bugdoll, while Belfreda packs?"

"Yes, thank you, Mr. Kingsblood.  Yes, I'll sit down in the
kitchen . . . while Miss Gray packs."  And vanished.



Vestal came back with laughter from supervising Belfreda's packing.

"Damn those tramps, they win!"

"How come?" they all said.

"I was simply delighted that Belfreda had up and quit.  I felt so
free.  And I thought I'd show 'em what a grand white-lady I am by
being cordial and forgiving.  I thought they'd slink off
repentantly in his car (which is quite a bus, by the way; I wish we
could afford one like it).  But they didn't.  They drove off
yelling 'Good-bye, honey' like hyenas.  Because while Belfreda was
up packing, Borus washed all the dishes and put 'em away, neater
than I ever saw, and he's left for us, right in the middle of the
kitchen table, a jorum of champagne!  My God, I never saw a jorum
of champagne before, outside of an advertisement!"

"What a man!" admired Kitty Sayward.  "I thought he had the most
stunning build I ever laid eyes on."

"Yes, quite a man," murmured Vestal absently.

But Charles Sayward, most genial of husbands, protested, "What kind
of white women do you two think you are, falling for a notorious,
booze-peddling, slot-machine-owning, white-slaving black gangster!
At least half of this country has plumb gone to hell--the women!"



6


The breakfasts were better, now that Vestal made them, and there
was always an ash-tray on the table, and the morning Banner.  Now
and then Neil danced a jig on the kitchen floor, and gloated "This
is all ours again!"

But, with the perversity of children and animals, Biddy and Prince
kept mourning for Belfreda, coming in to search for her, looking
reproachfully at Neil and Vestal, and saying, if only with their
eyes, "What did you do to our friend?"

Within a week Vestal engaged Nancy Havock's cousin, Shirley Pzort,
as maid.

Shirley was highly willing to share the cheer of the coming
Christmas; she was even friendlier than Vestal desired, and always
addressed her as "sweetie."  She was what at that period was known
as a "bobby-soxer"; an almost pure young woman, innocent and
graceful as a kitten, devoted to bubble-gum and dancing.

As December grew colder, Neil's injured leg began to ache again,
and he thought of the war, of companions who had been killed, of
the lonely hospital Christmas a year ago.  The Englishwomen had
been so kind, but he had longed for the voices of the Middlewest,
for his mother and Vestal and Biddy, his sisters Joan and Kitty.
He had them all now; it would be their first Christmas together in
three years.

He wondered what effect the war had had on him.  Had there been any
at all?

Lying in the hospital, he had been certain that all of the young
soldiers would get together when they returned and shut up that one
single revolving door called "the Republican and Democratic
Parties," and vote for righteousness and prosperity and no more
wars.  But when he had been in the bank for six weeks, as he heard
nothing from the bankers and lawyers and merchants except the
prophecy that That Man Roosevelt would be dictator of the country
by 1950, he slipped back into his normal faith in the security of
zeros.

But lately, at the Federal and Sylvan Park Tennis clubs, he had
found himself irritated by the frequent sneers at "kikes."  He
meditated:

--I don't suppose the Jews like being called "kikes" any more than
my French-Canadian ancestors liked being called "frog-eaters."  I
admitted that fellow Lieutenant Rosen who got killed by the land-
mine.  Sure, lots of Jews are just like us--I guess.  I ought to
get the liberal point of view while I'm still young, and then hold
onto it, or I might turn mean, when I'm fat and middle-aged and
president of this bank--or maybe of the First National of St. Paul.



These meditations were conducted at his desk, under the marble
vaulted ceiling of the Second National's banking-room.  He had been
busy with Small Loans all morning, particularly with returned
soldiers who wanted to start businesses, and he had tried to
combine generosity with caution.  It is not true that every banker
lies awake days plotting to ruin all establishments belonging to
small indignant men with crippled daughters.  The banking business
is usually not so good in a community with no money whatever.

He had before him a pile of folders with complicated financial
statements, and as he recalled his dawn-thoughts during the war,
the folders looked dreary.  He sighed over a cigarette and glanced
suspiciously at the fine brass plate with "N. Kingsblood, Asst.
Cashier."

When he had graduated from the University of Minnesota, in 1935, he
had planned to study medicine.  But in the summer he went temporarily
to work as a messenger in the Second National.  Nothing happened
that would blast him out of that smug mausoleum, and when he had
married Vestal and begot Biddy, he was caught, and not at all
unhappy about it.  He read books on banking; he rose to be teller;
he was popular with women customers who saw his smile and his red
hair through the bars that he did not know were there.  He was a
favorite of President John William Prutt for his steadiness and
good-humor and honesty, and this year, after his return from the
service, he had been made an assistant cashier.

Mr. Prutt believed in training his young men in all branches of
banking, and Neil, even now, was shifted about from "contacting
prospects" and the nursing of old customers through overdrafts to
book-work, to signing cashier-checks, and the transfer of funds,
and Prutt kept him familiar with the depositors by having him sit
in as teller for an hour or two every day.

He was as much in favor with the cashier, S. Ashiel Denver, who was
a neighbor in Sylvan Park, as he was with Mr. Prutt.

There were eight banks in Grand Republic, of which the largest was
the Blue Ox National: Norton Trock, president, Boone Havock,
chairman of the board, Curtiss Havock, general nuisance.  But Mr.
Prutt considered that institution and its twelve-story building
merely utilitarian.  He felt that the Second National (there was no
First) was in the true Morgan or Tellson's tradition.  In its two-
story marble temple, with massive bronze gates, at Chippewa Avenue
and Sibley Street, there were no offices to rent, and it did not
house alien chiropractors and machinery-agents.

In the banking-room, under the arched ecclesiastic vastness of its
ceiling, which was upheld by ponderous pillars of green Italian
marble, upon the glossy sea-shining floor of black marble inlaid
with squares and diamonds of polished granite and pink quartz,
where there was lacking only a robed choir of High-Church
bookkeepers to complete the spell of sanctity and of solvency,
Neil considered himself a minor canon.

Actually, he was another schoolboy in a row of schoolboy desks.

For all its slanted brass name-plate and its onyx combination
clock-inkstand-calendar-thermometer-barometer, his was a small
desk, a leg-cramping desk, and his only personal treasures were the
silver-framed photograph of Vestal and Biddy, his pipe and tobacco
pouch, a copy of True Detective Stories, and a begging letter from
his alumni secretary.



If Neil had any singular virtue, it was his loyalty to his friends.

He was thinking that at Christmas most of the dozen or so men whom
he called his "close friends" would still be in peril abroad, his
three intimates, Eliot and Judd and Rod, among them.

Eliot Hansen, the flashing, the dance-mad, the party-giver, was the
inheritor from his plain Norwegian father of the Sweet Scent Dairy
and Ice Cream Company, of which the symbol, to be seen on
billboards along every highway into Grand Republic, was a pot of
honey and a penny-piece.

Judd Browler, the sturdy, the careful, son of Duncan Browler who
was the first vice-president of Wargate's, had sold prunes and
biscuits in carload lots before the war.

The great man in that gallery was Rodney Aldwick.

Five years older than Neil, Princeton cum Harvard law-school, now a
well-decorated major in the tank corps, Rod Aldwick was the Great
Gentleman, the High Adventurer.  He was a polo-player, he was a
ski-stunter, he was a quick-memorizing genius who had only to look
at a page of print to know it.  He had the standard Anglo-Prussian
specifications for a hero: crisp hair, broad shoulders, slim waist,
and 6' 2".  Major Aldwick would never seduce any woman in the limbo
between countess and chambermaid, and if he had had slaves, he
would have hacked them to death, but he would never have nagged
them.  Probably he will some day be found dead in bed, not
necessarily his own bed, with either a dagger in his lungs or a
laurel-wreath, slightly twisted, on his fine white brow.

Neil reflected that if these intimates were here, he would be able
to discuss such personal puzzles as why he had recently enjoyed
hating Belfreda.  Then he admitted that all three of them had shied
away from any subject more spiritual than the legs of their
stenographers, any topic more embarrassing than the Republican
Party.  Only once in his life had Neil possessed a friend with whom
he could talk about fear and love and God, and that friend he had
known for only two weeks.

He had been young Captain Ellerton, whom Neil had met on the
transport to Italy.  All day, all night, they had talked.  Ellerton
was a designer of machinery, with a taste for Mozart and Eugene
O'Neill and Toulouse-Lautrec and Veblen, and he had not seemed to
be impertinent when he had asked, "Do you ever think about personal
immortality?" and "Do you love your Vestal out of love or out of
loyalty?"

Ellerton was killed by a sniper, forty-two minutes after they had
landed in Italy.

Neil had forgotten, by now, just what he had answered when, under
the Mediterranean stars, Tony Ellerton had speculated, "Since you
have only one life that you know of, do you enjoy devoting most of
it to banking?"



7


"We'll have an honest-to-God traditional Christmas, carols and
bellyaches and everything.  We'll celebrate, because the war will
be over by next year, and the boys will be coming home . . . and
we'll get more butter," Vestal rejoiced.

Their tree was a tall spruce from a northern swamp, but when she
came to decorate it she protested that the war was indeed terrible,
for in the Five-and-Tens and Tarr's Emporium there were only a few
silver balls and twisted sticks of colored glass.

She resolutely explored her father-in-law's attic and in a lurching
pasteboard carton, like Captain Kidd's treasure in a shoe-box, she
found the trinkets remaining from the good old days of 1940: a
great silver star, a silver-and-gold angel, glass oranges and
grapes and cherries, a handful of tinsel rain, and a jocose little
plaster statue of Santa Claus with a red coat and a red nose and a
lighted pipe.

She came home like a walking Christmas van, and that evening the
tree was ridden from the garage into the living-room on Neil's
stout back, and Vestal, Neil, Biddy, Prince, and Shirley danced
round it, squealing.

It was Neil's turn, this year, to entertain the whole Kingsblood
tribe on Christmas Day.  So, with all of her womanly genius raging,
Vestal coursed through Tarr's, allowing herself a strict budget of
seven presents to every ten dollars, and she accomplished a
fabulous wonder by finding, at Bozard's, a four-strand almost-real
pearl necklace for Mother Kingsblood for eleven dollars.  With a
not-even-almost-real diamond pendant attached to it.

It was at Tarr's that Vestal snatched up the gifts for Biddy: the
lovely, old-fashioned, starry-eyed, flaxen-headed doll which
resembled a plumper Biddy, and the lovely, new-fashioned machine
gun which, in the 1940's, had become just the right token of the
Christchild for a nice little girl.  And at Tarr's she got the new
collar and the rubber bone for Prince, the scarf for Shirley, and
the rosewood pipe for Neil's father, which the good dentist would
admire extravagantly and never use.

For themselves, Neil and Vestal put Biddy to bed early and spent
Christmas Eve dancing at the Pineland.

"It's a crime that you have to feed my whole hungry tribe
tomorrow," murmured Neil.

"Sweetie, anybody that you manage to get related to, even if it's
that second cousin of yours that runs the filling-station in
Hiawatha, Wisconsin, is my pal, and always will be."

"And I love you very much, and I'm praying that we'll have fifty
more happy Christmases together."

"I drink to that!" cried Vestal, holding up her tiny glass of the
white creme de menthe, frappe, which in Grand Republic is
considered the most elegant cordial.

Drexel Greenshaw, the dark-brown, stately headwaiter of the Fiesole
Room, with his small white mustache like that of a Haitian general
trained in France, smiled to see his young people still so much in
love.  It elevated his feudal soul to hover near Captain
Kingsblood, future president of the Second National, and his young
wife, a real lady, daughter of the Prairie Power and Light.

Drexel thought to himself, "It's just as I told that little fool,
Belfreda: if she didn't get along with a fine lady and gentleman
like that, it was all her fault.  My race will never have any
trouble with high-class white people.  I keep telling these colored
agitators like Clem Brazenstar that they do more harm to my race
than any mean buckra, and then they laugh at me and call me an
'Uncle Tom'!  Those radical scum don't know nothing about
aristocratic society.  I'm tickled to death to serve a gentleman
like Captain Kingsblood, that couldn't never be nothing but a
gentleman, nohow."

Thus did the magisterial old Tory take his triumph all by himself,
though he seemed to be considering nothing profounder than napkins.
When Neil and Vestal rose, Drexel humbly shadowed them to the door,
and chanted, "We always feel it's a great honor to have you here in
the Feesoly Room, Captain and Madam, and we hope we shall be
privileged to serve you again soon."

Drexel was almost hurt when Neil answered the tribute with a
dollar, but he controlled himself.



Back home, Neil telephoned a Merry Christmas to his father and
mother, at midnight, and they brought out the presents.  Vestal had
dug up wrinkled wrappings from pre-war Christmases, scarlet and
silver and crocus-yellow, and ironed them out, and the odd-shaped
boxes under the tree were a sparkling heap.

"It's so pretty!" she exulted.  "Oh, my dear lover, it's been
Christmas now for seventeen minutes, and you're back from the war
all safe, and everybody loves us, and we're going to be happy
forever."

They clung together and trembled.

They were a handsome, confident and parental couple, in flannel
dressing-gowns and purple scarves, when they came down before
breakfast on Christmas morning, to help open the presents; and
Biddy was a shining butterball in her tiny blue-and-white robe,
Shirley a small dark Eskimo, and Prince a barking whirligig of
excitement as they dragged the bright boxes out of the pile under
the tree.  Vestal was pleased by her own major gift, the fur-piece,
because it was handsomer than Nancy Havock's.  They had waffles for
breakfast, all of them--including Prince, and what a mistake that
was--and Christmas carols on the radio, and they dressed and
bustled into preparations for the family feast at two o'clock.



Head of the family was Neil's father, Dr. Kenneth M. Kingsblood,
whom the community esteemed equally for his bridgework, for his
Adult Bible Class at the Baptist Church, for his trap-shooting, and
for the jig-saw puzzles which he cut out on a private lathe.  He
was a ginger-colored man, tall and thin and kindly and hesitating.

Neil's mother, Faith, was small and slight and brown-haired, and
she always seemed to be a little afraid of life, a little surprised
that the four powerful children were really hers.  Yet her dark
eyes were as hot as those of her own mother, Julie Saxinar, that
piquant and bawdy Frenchwoman, who lacked only a scarlet kerchief
and a tambourine to become a gipsy.  Faith's eyes seemed to have a
life of their own, while all the rest of her was gentle and
entirely vague, and she never listened to anybody at all.

Next in the family were Brother Robert, the Vitavim Bread salesman,
the joker and total-recaller, and his wife Alice and their three
children, including Biddy's pal, Ruby.  But it must be understood
that Alice was not merely the wife of Robert Kingsblood.  She was
nothing less than sister of Harold W. Whittick, the poetic bull-
frog of advertising.

After them were Neil's sister, Kitty Sayward, with her Charles.
And youngest of Dr. Kenneth's children was Joan, who was still
living at home.  Joan was ten years younger than Neil; reasonably
pretty, reasonably intelligent, reasonably uninteresting.  She
thought that she wanted to go to Chicago and study dress-designing
and she knew that she wanted to stay here and be married,
preferably to her fiance, an affable young man who was now a
lieutenant in the Navy.

The tribe gathered, nine adults and six children--not to include
Shirley and Prince--and though they talked about Russia and
chemotherapy, they gave the feeling of the farmhouse-kitchen from
which none of them was ancestrally far distant.  The younger women
all bustled about the stove and set the table (including the cut-
glass dish of brandied peaches), while Neil elaborately served
cocktails to the men, and Mother Faith was throned in the blue
wing-chair by the fireplace, smiling and vague.

Dr. Kenneth took the head of the table of fifteen.  (Under the
linen table-cloths, there were concealed two cardtables, eking out
the mahogany.)  He looked down the two robust lines of people,
loving them all, surprised at how beautiful and buoyant they were.
He bowed his head, and in his thin kind voice he said grace:

"Dear Father in Heaven, through all these perilous days Thou hast
preserved us, to celebrate again the birthday of Thy dear son.  God
keep us together all this wondrous coming year, and bless these, my
children, bless them, oh, bless them!"

Neil remembered the hospital ward of a year ago.  He looked past
those beloved faces to the worn face of his father, and his breath
caught sharply.

"Gee, two turkeys!" reverently whispered Robert's Ruby.



After dinner, children and dogs and aunties were sleeping all over
the house.  Vestal's father, Morton Beehouse, accompanied by his
brother Oliver--they were widowers and they had dined at Oliver's--
honored the house by dropping in, bearing unnecessary things in
leather and synthetic ivory.  Dr. Kenneth was pleased to see how
easy his son Neil was with the fabulous Beehouses.

"He's a sterling young man," gloated Dr. Kenneth.  "He will go far.
Maybe it's time to tell him The Secret."

He watched his son through the quiet supper, the games of Monopoly
and gin-poker and charades, and in mid-evening he said to Neil
fondly, "Young fellow, you seem to think so blame well of your
trifling house and family, but your old man has to take you up to
your den and tell you the facts of life."

He was a man whose fancies sometimes ran away, and Neil followed
him upstairs with a degree of nervous surprise.



8


Dr. Kenneth M. Kingsblood (the M. was for his Scotch mother, Jennie
McCale) had puttered contentedly through life.  He was proud of
having once seen Ex-President Herbert Hoover on a train, and of
having bought a new X-ray machine, and to him each of his four
children was a golden filling.  He was more often tired than he
should be, at sixty, and his heart fluttered, and he thought that
perhaps Mother and he ought to go to Florida next March, when it
would be raw in Minnesota.

He was particularly pleased that Neil, the miracle child, was going
to be a financier and a civic leader, who would carry out all the
reforms--larger schools and a new water-reservoir--of which Dr.
Kenneth had dreamed, but which he had been too busy with dentistry
and gardening and scrollwork to carry out.

As they sat with knees close together in Neil's "den," smoking
cigars that harmonized only with Christmas or a dinner for the
Governor, Dr. Kenneth puffed:

"Boy, it's curious, your changing your dog's name to Prince,
because our family might have a special reason to be interested in
princes."

"How's that, Dad?"

"Well, maybe it's all foolishness.  I like to call it The Secret to
myself and here I am acting mysterious--guess the fact is, I don't
quite believe it myself, and I'll only tell you and not the rest
of the family, because you're the only one that's got enough
imagination so you won't laugh at me.  Just the same, there's one
chance in ten thousand that the story might be true, and if it was,
I guess the Beehouses would be mighty proud to be intermarried with
the Kingsbloods, and not the other way around."

"Dad, what IS this big mystery?"

"Son, my dad and his dad before him believed that we have sure-
enough royal blood in our veins."

"How do you mean?"

"Just what I say.  Maybe we're kings.  No joke.  And not any of
these French or German rulers, either--Looeys and Ferdinands and
that lot, but real royal BRITISH kings.  Some people think the name
Kingsblood is kind of unusual.  Well, it is, and for a very good
reason.  According to my dad's theory (if he ever really believed
it, of which I ain't too sure), 'Kingsblood' was originally a kind
of nickname for our forbears, indicating that they had the blood of
kings--as you and I have!  Now what do you think of THAT?"

"I don't know as I'd care so much, Dad.  I'd rather live in Grand
Republic than in a drafty old palace."

"Well, so would I, for that matter.  I bet none of them have
automatic furnaces.  But I just mean it would be kind of nice if,
while we went right on sticking to business here, we could know
that by rights--maybe--we're really the kings of England.  It would
tickle your mother and Joan and Vestal and some day Biddy.  And I
don't guess it would hurt your position in the bank one bit if Mr.
Prutt realized what kind of a high-born guy he had working for him.
IF it's true!

"The theory is that by the true line of descent, I'm the king of
Britain, and you would be my successor.  Of course I suppose your
brother could claim to be Prince of Wales, but (if the thing were
true), I don't know but what I'd ask Robert to step aside, as he
certainly ought to, fellow with no imagination like that, and I do
wish to God he would quit referring to my really very fine
collection of Florida seashells, as 'that junk'!

"Well, here's the dope.  I was told about it by my father, William,
who may not have been any great shakes as a royal monarch but he
certainly was the smartest farmer and horsetrader in Blue Earth
County.  He had the story from HIS father, Daniel Kingsblood, the
Civil War one, and he had it in turn from HIS father, Henry Aragon
Kingsblood, who was born in Kent, England, in 1797, and emigrated
to New Jersey, after having been arrested for publicly claiming, at
a state fair or whatever they had in those days in England, that he
was the Legitimate Monarch of Great Britain and Ireland--and I
suppose all these Realms Beyond the Sea, whatever they are.  He'd
of been King Henry the Ninth.  And born right there in England that
way, maybe he knew--maybe it's true!  How's that?"

"Well, it's interesting, but I don't suppose we could prove it,
even if it was true."

"That's what I'm coming to.  I notice that, now your leg keeps you
from going out for sports, you read a lot more than you used to.
So maybe it would amuse you to look into this.  I'd kind of like to
know about it, before I pass on.

"We haven't a scrap of written proof.  I always intended to try and
check the facts, but I've been awful busy, and household cares and
so on, and all of us dentists overworked, with so many of the
profession in the armed services, and here lately it seems as if
people have no consideration about a dentist's schedule and think
you can work 'em in any time, especially these young punks home
from school on vacation.  If you let 'em, they'd simply work a
dentist to death, and THEN never pay their bills, and so--I never
got the time.  But here's what happened, the way I got it.

"This Henry Aragon Kingsblood claimed he was descended from a son
of Henry the Eighth and Catherine of Aragon, who would be the real
heir.  But when Henry got sore at Catherine and kicked her out, he
concealed the existence of this son, who's supposed to have been
named Julian, Prince Julian, and who was brought up by faithful
cottagers who called him 'Julian of the King's Blood'--hence our
name.

"Now of course, him being the son of Catherine, that makes us part
Spanish, and I don't know as I like that so much--I've always been
proud of our English and Scotch blood; you know my mother was very
distantly related to Bruce and Wallace and all those famous
kilties, and THAT'S a REAL fact!  But still, when you think that
Catherine's folks were Ferdinand and Isabella, that told Columbus
to go and discover America, that makes her just about as high-born
as the English, and you can see from our red hair, yours and mine,
that the Spanish blood hasn't done us any harm.

"Well, there's the story.  Maybe there isn't a word of truth in it,
but do you suppose you could make a little effort to find out,
boy?"

He looked so wistful.  Neil was fond of his gentle father, and he
vowed, "You bet I will, Dad."

"I'd appreciate it.  Just remember that it's not plumb impossible.
There was this fellow out West, in Alberta, I think it was, or it
might have been Wyoming--I don't believe he was a Mormon, but very
likely he was--and he found out he was the rightful earl of
something or other--just a plain ranchman!  So you see."

"Anyway, be kind of nice to know," Neil agreed.  "And you may think
it's a joke, but when Biddy put on that gilt crown in front of the
tree, she sure looked like a real queen.  Yes, I'll take a shot at
it."

And in January of the new year, he did.



9


He had read enough of pretenders to titles and lands to be certain
that his father's claim was fool's gold.  But the arrogant nonsense
of it amused him, and he wanted a new hobby.

Since his leg would not let him ski, or go wallowing through the
snowdrifts after rabbits, swimming at the Federal Club was his only
sport.  He had bored himself with bridge, with crossword puzzles,
with an aimless reading of travel and biographies and the novels,
the spiritual flowering of the war, in which Elizabethan tarts
delighted several million respectable readers by doing things which
would be considered undesirable in a young lady of Elizabeth, New
Jersey.

He was glad that it was England of which he was to be king.  He had
seen little of it beyond docks, trains and a Tudor manor house
which had been turned into a hospital, but he had felt that the
kind and weary Englishwomen who had nursed him had been veritably
his own people.  From his room of convalescence he had looked out
all day at a flint church with a battlemented tower and long harp-
strings of winter-bleached ivy, and coming and going through its
pointed door he had seen Tess and Jude and Little Nell and Lorna
Doone--and J. G. Reeder and Henry Baskerville.  There was no
building in Grand Republic, not even the bit of log stockade from
1862 which was built into the Fashion Livery Stable Garage, which
was to him so admirable a proof of the enduring courage of mankind.

He had a much shrewder notion than his father of what would happen
if the London newspapers were to be informed that an American
banking gentleman had decided to be their king.  Yet if there were
that one-millionth chance, if it could be true--

Why not look into the history books and find out whether his
father's Secret was completely absurd, or only ninety-nine per
cent. so?  It would be exciting for Biddy to be able to say that
she was the king's daughter.  From what he knew of that dictatorial
young lady, he would not think it beyond her to round up all the
neighborhood children and yelp, "Oyez, oyez, you canst now approach
my royal person."  He remembered the Christmas crown of gilt paper,
which she had worn proudly though sidewise.

At the kitchen table, over gin-and-ginger-ale, he explained it all
to Vestal.  It was on a winter Sunday afternoon.  They had gorged
on turkey, napped, listened to the broadcast of the Philharmonic
Orchestra, studied the sports and fashions in the Sunday Frontier-
Banner.  On the sun-porch, Biddy, with her cousin Ruby and Peggy
Havock, was playing with the debris of her Christmas presents.  As
children of the final Anglo-Saxon civilization, they were machine-
gunning a sad-eyed brown woolen pup and a doll with a glass
necklace and a broken nose.

"So look who's a king!" Vestal jeered.  "Your dad certainly is an
old darling, and the craziest dreamer in town.  Isn't that nice!
If we ever save up enough money, which with the present price of
meat is highly unlikely, we might go over to the Old Country and
look at Our palace, and then get the hell back here, where we
understand the dialect.  But may I say, Captain, that I couldn't
love you better if you were not only King of Britain but Exalted
Ruler of the Elks.  Anyway, I bet I play a sharper game of gin-
rummy than any other queen living.  Come here."

In the sun-room she dug Biddy's crown out from the Christmas ruins
and gravely placed it on Neil's brow, adjusting it as she would a
new hat, and she demanded of the three delighted babies, "Now tell
me, chicks, what is he?"

"He's a king!" they all shrieked.

Vestal curtsied to him.

"You are both very silly," said Biddy.

In that world of war-widowed wives and of babies who had never seen
their fathers, Biddy was proud of having a visible and proven
father.

"How would you like it if I were a sure-enough king?" asked Neil.

His daughter admired, "I think you'd be a dandy king, and then
maybe you could be an actor in the movies!"

It was Shirley's Sunday night off.  As Neil and Vestal got the
supper, she meditated, "I love trying to think of you as a king,
but I can't do it.  You're so obviously just what you are: a one-
hundred per cent. normal, white, Protestant, male, middle-class,
efficient, golf-loving, bound-to-succeed, wife-pampering, Scotch-
English Middlewestern American.  I wouldn't believe that you were
anything else, not if you brought me papers signed by General
Eisenhower to prove it.  Oh, didums want to be a king, in a castle?
Well, you shall be king in my heart."

"Maybe there's a lot of girls that would like me to be king in
their hearts."

"Are there now!  Isn't that lovely.  Slice those potatoes as fine
as you can, will you, sire?"



He would never have begun the great genealogical research if his
father had not twice begged, "Started to look up our ancestors
yet?"  Suddenly, on a Saturday afternoon when Vestal had the car
and was off playing bridge, he determined, "Why not?  At least it
would be nice, now that I'll never get much credit in golf or
tennis again, if I got to be known as a good historian.  Why not?"

He went up to his den, and sat down at his table, a scholar,
dedicated and immovable, the vows taken, his lifework clear and
vigorously begun, while Vestal and Rod Aldwick and Mr. Prutt and
his one-time professor of European History all stood behind him, in
awe.

There was one trouble:  Now that he had begun his research, just
how did you begin a research?

His head slowly turned as he peered speculatively about the room.
There seemed to be no very relevant material except Dickens's A
Child's History of England, a World Almanac, and The Yankee
Universal Cyclopedia, in four volumes.

Resolutely he opened the cyclopedia to look up Catherine of Aragon.
All that he learned was that she had been married to Henry, had had
a daughter but no son, and that it had taken the destruction of the
True Church to get rid of her.

--Well, if she didn't have a son, then her son could have been our
ancestor.  No, that doesn't sound right.

A Child's History was no more helpful.

What DID you do with this research stuff?

Probably, you first wrote and bothered some authority.  But which
authority?  His university history professor had never indicated
that he longed for correspondence with tennis players.  Was there
some fellow in the Government whose job it was to explain how you
got historical facts?  And who was this writer who knew so much
about all kinds of history and wrote these great, big books--five
dollars a throw?

How did all these professors chase out and get all this information
about some guy who had been dead for a couple hundred years?  In
the university, he had had no singular respect for professors; they
had seemed to him oppressive and full of nasty tricks to catch a
fellow who had been out on a bock-beer party last evening.

"Those guys may have it harder than I realized.  How do you suppose
they decide what Shakespeare meant in some line when chances are he
was cockeyed when he wrote it, and didn't know himself?  I probably
missed a lot of chances when I was in college.  I'll make up for
them now."

It is to be said for Neil Kingsblood that the hardness of a task
did not repel him.  Now that he saw the disinterring of his royal
ancestors as arduous digging, he really began to work.

He hobbled rapidly to Sylvan Circle, took the bus down to Rita
Kamber's Vanguard Book Shop, and bought Trevelyan's History of
England.  In the second-hand bins he saw two treasures which could
not help him greatly, he knew, but which he could not resist:  Lady
Montressor's Memoirs of Court, Camp, and Stately Residences of Our
Fair Isle, two volumes, bound in white buckram with heraldic
stampings, extra-illustrated, a great bargain, marked down from
$22.50 to $4.67, and Metaphrastic Documentation of Feoffments under
Henry VIII, a doctoral thesis by J. Humboldt Spare, Ph.D.,
published at $2.50, now fifteen cents.

His arm ached as he lugged them back to the bus, and he wondered,
"Will I ever really go through them?"  He was having the first,
great, gloomy disillusionment in his career as a scholar.

He also bought Hard-Hitting Hockey, by Sandy Gough, and this,
later, he actually read.



When his father heard that the research was begun, he hunted
through old trunks and gave Neil a holograph letter from Daniel
Kingsblood, the carpenter-farmer who had been in the Civil War,
son of the Henry Aragon who had been driven out of England.  Neil
tasted it avidly:


Agst 7, 1864

My dr wfe:

I take my pen in hand to tell you all well so far hope Wm & you
same.  We are somewhere in Va or Car not sure which the sarjent
will not tell us.  Food is very bad am not complaining I suppose
somebody has to fight this damn war but no place for man of almost
40 officers very mean and stuck up reumatism comes back when damp
do not like these mts too hard to go up & down much prefer our Mich
farm even if in wild & wooly west well there is no special news
camp was attacked other night but halfharted do not think the
graybellies like this War any better than us so getting along
alright hope you all well.  Must close now, your affct husband

Daniel R. Kingsblood


Dr. Kenneth, nervously trotting his fingers in air, urged,
"Wonderful letter, eh!  Can't you just see the old boy?  Golly,
those fellows were patriotic!  Took things like they came--endure
anything for the sake of preserving the nation.  Wonderful letter.
I bet a historian would pay a lot to see that letter, but I'm not
going to let one of those fellows even take a look at it, and don't
you ever show it to 'em if they come snooping around.  Well, that
ought to be an inspiration to you, eh?"

"Oh yes--yes--sure, Dad."

"Well now, this is going to be a great surprise to you.  I think I
know where there's a lot of letters from not only my father and old
Daniel but maybe Henry Aragon himself!  Think of that!  My cousin,
Abby Kiphers, was a great hand to save papers, in Milwaukee, the
hardware-dealer's wife, and I've already written to her.  How'll
that be for honest-to-God treasure-trove, eh?"

"Grand," said Neil feebly.  "Original documents.  I guess they're
what you want for research."



From Cousin Abby came the letters from William, Daniel, and Henry
Aragon Kingsblood, and Neil fell upon them like a kitten upon a
catnip-mouse.

He learned a good deal about the price of wheat in 1852, the
voraciousness of pigs in 1876, and the health of a whole gallery
of Emmas, Abigails, and Lucys, but all of it was singularly
unilluminating about royalty.  Even in Henry Aragon's letters,
written in New Jersey between 1826 and 1857, there was only one
sentence that might be of guidance:

"These Jerseyites can never seem to decide whether they prefer a
Fool or a Scoundrel for Governor, and if I were King of this
ignorant Land, I would hang the whole pack of them."

Neil unhappily concluded that his father's ancestors were an
industrious, sober, and dreary lot, and that if he ever did reach
back to the putative son of Catherine, the fellow would probably
prove to have become a pious gravedigger.  He sighed, "I never did
think I'd have much luck at getting to be royal.  It was just a
chore I promised to do for Dad.  I believe I'll chuck it and think
about Biddy and the future, not about Lord High Prince Whoozit.
Hell with him."

But he had been aroused to enough interest in his family to
consider now his mother's line.  He hoped that they would be
spicier.

He knew little of them, though as a student at the university he
had often seen his mother's mother Julie Saxinar, who was still
living.  His mother and Gramma Julie had never been harmonious, and
for five years now Neil had not seen her, but he remembered her as
a spark-eyed, tiny, scoffing old Frenchwoman, whose childhood had
been struggled through on the Wisconsin frontier.  The next time he
saw his mother, late one afternoon, he suggested:

"I've been reading about Dad's family, Mom, but what about yours?"

They were in the "back parlor" of Dr. Kenneth's lean and aging
house, an ill-ventilated room, all brown and dark-gray, jammed with
a decrepit roll-top desk and imitation-ebony chairs carved with
dragons.  Faith Kingsblood was small and flexible, and in her there
was a curious stillness.  She said little; she seemed always to be
waiting for something of which she was apprehensive.  Her eyes were
bead-black, but her face pale and her lips a faded pink.  She
trusted Neil and approved of him, and she never gave him advice nor
anything more demonstrative than a pat on the arm.

She mused as though she was trying to remember something pleasant
but dusty with time.

"I don't really know much about my folks.  My father's folks, the
Saxinars, were about like your father's: Scotch and English stock,
good steady farmers and little businesses.  All I know about Mama's
family is, they were French, and I understand that in the old days
they were in the fur trade in Canada.  But those frontiersmen, I
don't suppose they ever wrote down much about themselves.  One time
when I asked Mama about them, she just laughed, and she said, 'Oh,
they were a terrible lot of boozy canoemen--nobody for a clean
little girl to hear about.'  You know, Mama is a funny woman.  I
think she always kind of objected to my having so much Saxinar in
me, and being so neat and orderly, and clean pinnies.  Ain't that
strange!"

She slipped back into her silent waiting, and the quest of his
ancestors became to Neil slightly absurd.



In so vast a universe as Grand Republic, with nearly a hundred
thousand people, there are many worlds unknown to one another.  One
of the worlds least known to Neil was the feverish one of music:
violin teachers giving lessons in the "front parlors" of red-brick
houses in rows; little girls learning the saxophone; the Symphony
Association which, once a year, managed to bring the Duluth
Orchestra to town.

This year, with the local Finnish Choral Society, the orchestra
appeared at the Wargate Memorial Auditorium, in late January.
Along with such ordinary citizens as Neil and Vestal, the
fabulously great appeared at the concert: Webb and Louise Wargate,
Dr. Henry Sparrock, Madge Dedrick with her daughter, Eve Champeris,
Oliver and Morton Beehouse, Greg and Diantha Marl, Judge and Mrs.
Cass Timberlane--she a frail, excited sparkle.  Even Boone and
Queenie Havock were there, both slightly drunk, as that was the
only state in which they could endure the enjoyment of music.

(There were also present, but unmarked by the Frontier society
reporter, a number of people who liked music.)

It amused Neil to think of how they would all turn from the mild
magnificence of Hannikainen on the podium to HIM, if they knew that
he was a Royal Personage. . . .  He might wear his crown and ermine
down to work on the Sylvan Park bus, and set up court at his desk
at the Second National.

He forgot these splendors as the orchestra and the chorus marched
into Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  He was borne into a place he had
never seen.  It was a spacious prospect across ornamental waters
and oak-shadowed lawns to the pillars of a great house whose
windows were wreathed with stone flowers.  Behind it was a hill of
heather, and over all a tower, broken and ancient.  And it seemed
to him that this was all his own.

"Is this some ancestral memory?" he wondered.  "Did some great-
great-something, that is me now, own that once?  Is it maybe true
that I could be a king?

"Or duke?

"Oh, settle for a baron!"



10


He was developing a new idea in banking, and it had been
gratifyingly approved by Mr. Prutt and Cashier S. Ashiel Denver.

He was establishing a Veterans' Advisory Center where, as they were
discharged from the Army or Navy, Neil's former companions in arms
could come for information about finding jobs and renting houses,
about Government compensation and educational grants--and it would
be all right if they started new accounts in the Second National,
or took out wholesome mortgages.

Neil was to be in charge, with a salary increase to three hundred
and fifty a month, and if the Center grew enough, he was to have an
assistant.  Now, in that Northern April that was not spring but a
dilution of winter, he was certain that the war in Germany would be
over in a few months, and he hastened to get ready the Center's
corner, which resembled a handsome mahogany horse-stall, with
Neil's desk and two velvet chairs and a considerably less velvety
bench, all fit for heroes.

He bustled all day and bubbled every evening.  Vestal was pleased
with his achievement and his advancement, and Biddy started a bank
of her own, in which her cousin Ruby, Uncle Robert's daughter,
deposited six pins, the very first day, and Prince a damaged dog-
biscuit.  This bank came to no good, however, because Ruby, whose
ethics were not up to Prutt banking standards, managed to withdraw
eleven out of her six pins, and Biddy, after counsel from Uncle
Oliver Beehouse, declared bankruptcy.

Mr. Prutt was cautious in his hopes for the Veterans' Center, but
Neil saw no limits to it, and late in April he went by train to St.
Paul and Minneapolis, to consult bankers, state officials, and the
heads of the American Legion and the other organizations of
veterans.



As a banking expert, he took the chair-car Borup.

To the chronic globe-trotters of Grand Republic and Duluth, the
Borup had for many years been an ambulatory home.  It was so old
that its familiars insisted it was not constructed of steel but of
wood hardened by winter storms and the prairie July, when the
thermometer goes to a hundred and ten.  Its interior was decorated
with inlaid woods, olive-green and rose and gray.  It had been laid
out with such pleasant irregularity that you might have known it
for years before you opened a door and discovered another
compartment with a table for card-players and four aged chairs
covered with prickly green hair-shirting.

On the Borup Old Mr. Sparrock, Hiram Sparrock, Dr. Henry's father,
still alive though somewhat retired at ninety-four, keeps spare
sets of his five pills and three tonics and two dentures, with a
comb and a stick of mustache-brilliantine.  Hiram, that genial old
cutthroat who knew John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and Cecil Rhodes,
still has, despite the properties he made over to his son, a
million acres of land in the United States, and his holdings in
Mexico are measured not by miles but by airplane time.  It is
generally believed in Grand Republic that Hiram is richer even than
the Wargates or the Eisenherzes, but he invariably talks about his
poverty, and he never gives Mac, the colored porter on the Borup,
more than a quarter.

His son, Dr. Henry Sparrock, keeps on the Borup a Modern Library
edition of Karl Marx, which for five years he has been trying to
read, in the hope that he will find out "what all these leftwing
congressmen and these radical labor leaders are up to," but for
five years an invitation to play bridge has always interrupted him
just as he has started to read page two again.

And on the Borup, Madge Dedrick keeps her pack of monogrammed cards
for solitaire, and Oliver Beehouse a crossword puzzle book, and
Diantha Marl a book on psycho-analysis, a book on etiquette, and a
bottle of brandy.

Mac the porter, fat and very dark and nearly seventy and
professionally genial, knows all of them.  He shepherds the
college-going daughters of couples whose wedding journey he
remembers, and calls them "Miss," even though all through younger
years he has known them as "Toots" or "Kay."  He finds their lost
compacts and candy-boxes, and tries to keep them from being too
chummy with handsome strangers met on the train.  He knows which
husbands say farewell to which wives at one end of the run, and
which husbands meet and kiss them at the other.

Mac is the Almanach de Gotha, the sexless maid-valet, the fichuless
chaperon of Duluth and Grand Republic and all the towns along the
D. & T. C.; it were better socially to be cut by Dr. Sparrock and
ignored by Mrs. Dedrick than to be unrecognized by Mac; and to call
him "George" instead of "Mac" is to be admittedly an outer
barbarian; and so far as Neil or his friends had ever known, he
has no surname.

He greeted Neil with, "Mighty nice to have you traveling with us,
Captain Kingsblood, sir.  I hope to hear your injured limb is
ameliorating, sir."

"Yes, thanks, it's a lot better, Mac."

--Kind of flattering to have Mac remember me.  Mustn't forget to
tip him two bits.

"Would you like to see the Minneapolis morning paper, Captain,
sir?"

"Oh, thank you, Mac."

--No, four bits.  There's an old darky that knows his place.  Why
can't these young fools like Belfreda be considerate that way?  Be
just too bad if I hand Mac fifty or even seventy-five cents!

--And of course it would go on my expense-account.



At the end of the journey, when Mac had brushed him off as though
he was brushing him off, and had caressed him with, "Hope we're
going to have the honor of having you with us on your return trip,
Captain, sir," Neil solemnly handed him a dollar.

Farther down the car, as they came into the station, Old Hiram
Sparrock growled at Mac, "Hey, you Machiavellian bastard, aren't
you going to hope you'll have the honor of my riding back with
you?"

"No, SIR, General.  You always make too much trouble--you and those
ole pills."

"Why, you gold-digging, uncle-tomming, old, black he-courtesan!
Here's a quarter, and you're mighty lucky to get it."

"I sure am, General.  Big lot of money for doing nothing but look
at you.  Usually ain't but fifteen cents.  You make another stock-
market killing, General?"

"None of your damn intrusive business.  How many newspapers do you
spy for?"

"All of 'em, General.  See you soon."

Neither of them mentioned the fact that Old Hiram gave Old Mac
fifty dollars every Christmas.  The two relics of the lumber-land-
iron feudalism of 1900 grinned at each other, and young Neil
Kingsblood looked approvingly at their stock-company performance.



11


Neil had fancied that the vague estrangement between his mother
and her parents had come from Gramma Julie Saxinar's habit of
diminutively managing every one within range of her cackling and
cheery voice.  There had never been real hostility, but the family
coolness had kept Neil from any great custom of intimacy with his
grandparents.

But he did take one evening during his four-day official mission in
Minneapolis to go out to Lake Minnetonka and call on the Saxinars.

At sixty-five, when he had retired from the telephone company (he
was still living, at eighty-five), Edgar Saxinar had purchased
something very tidy in the way of a one-story house.  He had
admirably described it in a letter:

"We have settled down in a stone bungalow right on the romantic
waters of old Lake Minnetonka, with views.  There is no city as
large as Minneapolis that has as large not to say lovely a lake as
Minnetonka within so small a comparable distance.  Mrs. Saxinar and
I often talk about the romantic Indians who used to canoe on these
romantic waters."

The bungalow was not actually of stone, but of cement blocks so
pressed as to look somewhat like stones, and the Saxinars' view did
not actually include the justly celebrated expanse of Minnetonka,
three blocks away from them, but only an eight-flat frame apartment
house, a Seventh-Day Adventist chapel, and a grove of cotton-woods.
But it was as snug a refuge for two happily querulous old parties
as could have been contrived, and Neil felt content as he sat on a
tufted yellow plush chair in the small living-room, whose yellow
wallpaper was bedecked with a pattern of cat-tails and water
lilies.

Though he had had a steak dinner at the Hotel Swanson-Grand, Gramma
Julie insisted on taking him out to the kitchen and stuffing
chocolate brownies into him.  Hers was no glass-and-enamel
magazine-advertisement kitchen.  She cooked on an aged, not-too-
well-polished coal-stove, and kept her treasures in a series of
broken-nosed blue teapots and tin cracker-cans and her china came
out of an antique shop and should have stayed there.  Neil
remembered that while his mother and Grampa Edgar had always
insisted that they were neat (usually it was pins that they were as
neat as), the gay little black beetle, Julie, was a genius of gipsy
disorder.

But he noted that in this mess of crockery Gramma Julie could find
anything she wanted, while his mother and Grampa, proud of
arranging everything geometrically, of properly filing away
addresses and letters and laundry bills and not-quite-wornout
shoelaces, could never remember their own systems.

He returned with Julie to the living-room, to be grand-filial to
that squat, bald, cheerful and complaining patriot, Grampa Edgar
Saxinar.

He dutifully made the regulation queries about Edgar's views on the
state income tax, the last-season Minneapolis baseball team and
future models of telephone instruments.  (Edgar thought very little
of any of them.)  Then Neil demanded the one thing he really wanted
to know:

"Gramma Julie, something Dad told me has got me interested in my
ancestors.  Tell me about your family, and Grampa's."

The little, odd, old lady, eighty-three now by the calendar and
forty-three by the clock of her taut slim throat and the obsidian
eyes that needed no spectacles, half gipsy and half Irish fay with
a trace of Yankee stringency for preservative, knitting and rocking
in the untidy old cane-seated chair that her husband detested,
while he, with old-fashioned half-moon eyeglasses clerkly in his
round red face, smoked a long stogie and constantly grunted in
disbelief--Gramma Julie clucked like a nesting hen:

"Your Grampa Saxinar--that solid object there, smoking the
stinkeroo--was born in Wisconsin and he worked for a sawmill, as
bookkeeper, and he was a clerk and a telegrapher for the Chicago,
Milwaukee before he got a job in the telephone office.  And his
folks, as far as he knows 'em, were like everybody else: cheese-
makers and mouse-trap salesmen--nice stupid people."

Edgar spouted like a pond-sized whale.  "Now that's all right now!
Saxinars good people, and so was Neil's father's folks.  I had
good, solid antecedents, Republicans and Calvinist Presbyterians,
almost without an exception, thank God!"

Julie snickered, "That's what I said.  Nice and stupid.  But my own
folks, they were French.  The women all wore ribbons and the men
all took 'em off!"

Neil cajoled her, "Now Granny, I learned in the Army that the
French aren't a bit wicked, as their funny papers make out.
They're the carefullest farmers in Europe, and the tightest shop-
keepers."

"Maybe one kind of French are.  But my ancestors were the light-
footed breed that skipped off from Europe because it was too tame,
and settled in Quebec, and skipped off from there, too, because it
was too pious, and they drank high wines and wouldn't have any
truck with anybody that was tamer than the wolves and lynxes and
Assiniboins."

She looked inward on a red-lit girlhood, and mused aloud:  "I was
born in Wisconsin, too, in Hiawatha, and my, it was a tough
lumbertown, then, and I danced with the raftsmen--I could dance
awful light and they wore red caps."

Edgar snorted, "Isn't that kind of mixed-up?"

"Well, it WAS mixed up--more 'n you'll ever know, old man!  Even
then, when it was all tarpaper shanties and pine clearings, you
Saxinars read your Sabbath Extracts for Little Christians.  But my
folks--  My father, Alexandre Payzold, he died when I was ten, and
so did my mama, it was a small-pox epidemic."

Neil was wondering how Vestal, Old Bay Colony out of Dorset, would
accept this torch-glaring wilderness origin, as Julie clucked on,
in tune to her knitting-needles:

"Yes, Alexandre Payzold.  I don't guess I recollect him very good,
except he was a fine, big man, with a huge, enormous black beard--
it tickled!--and he sang lots.  He was a mail-runner and he worked
some in the Big Woods and he drove the first coach--oh, he spoke
English good, I remember that, but he'd yell at the horses in
French.  When him and Mama died, I was only ten, and I was raised
by Mama's brother, Uncle Emil Aubert.  He was a fur-trader.  He
never told me much about Papa's folks, the Payzolds.

"But I know my Papa's papa, Louis Payzold, was a farmer and a
trapper and he dug some copper on Lake-Superior, and he married a
girl named Sidonie Pic, and HER father was Xavier Pic--let's see--
Xavier would be your great-great-great-grandfather.

"Uncle Emil knew a little about Xavier, because Xavier was a
wonderful fellow that got around all over the frontier.  I don't
suppose there's anything about him in history--he never got rich,
and of course they never kept many records or had any newspapers in
the wilderness.  From what I recall of what Uncle Emil told me--oh
dear, it's maybe seventy years ago now since I heard his stories!--
Xavier was the best kind of French voyageur.  Maybe there was some
bad things about him, too, but I guess Uncle Emil wouldn't tattle
about them to a little girl like I."

"I don't think I'd talk about Pic," urged Grampa Edgar.

"I will so!  I'm proud of him.  Well, Xavier Pic, he must of been
born around 1790.  Uncle Emil said that some folks claimed he was
born on Mackinac Island and some on Lake Pepin and some in New
Orleans or even back in the Old Country, in France, and they all
said Xavier wasn't a tall man, but awful strong and brave, and he
could sing fine and he drank too much, and languages, my! they
claim he spoke all the languages there are--French and English and
Spanish and Chippewa and Sioux and Cree--Xavier spoke them all,
Uncle Emil told me, and my Uncle Emil was a truthful man, except
about furs.  Oh, Edgar would have hated Xavier Pic!"

"Always did.  If you didn't just make him up," explained Grampa
Edgar.

"Yes, like I said.  So Xavier--they say he was a voyageur for the
Hudson's Bay Company, but afterwards he was a coureur de bois for
himself, a free trader and a fur-buyer.  He was slick at shooting
the rapids.  Prob'ly when he was young, he wore a sash, like the
voyageurs did, and he sang--

"Why, Neil, I think I must of told you a little about Xavier when
you were only as high as my kitchen stove.  You would forget it
now, but do you remember the little song I taught you of the
voyageurs, Dans Mon Chemin?"

"Yes, by golly I do begin to remember it now, Gramma."



From his anecdotal Minnesota history in high school, from lost
tales of his mother and Gramma Julie, Neil could see the outlines
now of his ancestor, Xavier Pic.

While Gramma Julie nodded in silence, he sketched that robust and
jovial French adventurer.

Xavier was not plowing dun English fields, like the worthy forbears
of Dr. Kenneth, who were doubtless as rustic as they alleged
themselves to be royal.  Xavier belonged not to evening and mist
and gossiping cowbells but to alert morning on the glittering
rapids of unknown rivers.  Neil saw him coming out of Montreal on a
spring morning, with the squadron of canoes bound away for the
pine-darkened fort at the mouth of the Kaministikwia.

Xavier Pic.  He would be a pink-cheeked and ribald roisterer with a
short and curly golden beard, and he would be wearing a blanket-
cloth capote of morning blue, thrown back, with his tobacco pouch
and his agile knife swung from his scarlet sash.  His moccasins and
leggins were of elkskin, and in his knitted cap was the feather of
a Nor'wester.

Challenging the rapids and the wolf-haunted night in the immense
loneliness of the Northern forest, laughing back at the monstrous
storms of Lake Superior, scoffing at cold and hunger and the malign
Indians, Xavier would be singing with his mates, at the gay start
of the journey:


     Dans mon chemin j'ai rencontre
     Trois cavaliers bien montes--
        Lon, Lon, laridon daine.


Thus, not in words but in images, bright and strong, Neil recalled
the springtime hero who was his source.



All that would have been when Xavier was young.  When Gramma Julie
roused from her catnap and went on, she surmised, from the shadows
of great legends she had heard in girlhood, that Xavier became an
independent trader.  She knew that he lived on till 1850, always a
mover, and she was certain that he had been the first white man to
explore dark leagues of wasteland where now there are farms and
villages that were founded on the rock of Xavier's skill and
bravery.

It was unquestionable, she stridently maintained against her
husband's grunting, that this pioneering Frenchman had been one of
the builders, the primitive warrior-kings, of the new provinces of
the Americans and the British: Minnesota and Wisconsin, Ontario and
Manitoba.

But, Neil improvised, Xavier's service to the Anglican visky-
guzzlers must have been involuntary.  He must still have borne in
his heart the Lilies of the Sun, not the beef-red banner of the
British nor the candy-striped bunting of the Yanks.  Might not this
valorous Gaul, more than some lanky English lordling, have been the
ancestor who established for him a valid claim to the blood royal?

This would not gratify Dr. Kenneth, who had none of Xavier's fire
in his brittle veins, but some day it would enchant a Biddy who was
as venturesome as Xavier.

Why not?  Who could tell?  Perhaps this singular Xavier Pic was the
exiled offspring of some half-royal Duc of Picardie!

But the ducal banner was instantly taken from Neil's hand.



"You understand," said Gramma Julie, "that Xavier may not have been
pure French?  I wouldn't wonder if he was part Indian.  We may be
part Chippewa ourselves, you and me."

"Chippewa?" said Neil, not very brightly.

"Why, you haven't got any prejudice against our having some Indian
blood?" said the old lady, with a foxy glance at her husband.

"No, no, certainly not!" declared Neil, with an extraordinary lack
of conviction.  "I haven't any prejudices against any race.  After
all, I was in the War Against Prejudice!"

Grampa Edgar complained, "'Tain't a question of the boy having
prejudices against being a nekkid, baby-scalping Indian.  You just
don't have to advertise everything you know!"

Julie eyed her man.  "Don't talk like you got the simples!  I ain't
afraid to advertise what MY folks were!  They never peddled wooden
clocks, like some!  If anybody came up to me and asked, 'Are you a
tomahawking Indian?' I'd say, Sure.  And tomahawk 'em!"

While the old ones bickered, with the skill of sixty years'
practice, Neil was in a small state of shock.  In a general way, he
believed that Indians were very fine people--they were good at
canoeing and the tanning of deerskins.  But it was a tumble from
the castle of a Duc de Picardie to a bark lodge, smoke-encrusted.

After some spirited notes on Edgar's ancestors as Yankee skinflints,
Julie was going on:

"Anyway, the only time that I ever heard of Xavier's getting
careless and marrying, the girl was a Chippewa squaw, so I guess
we got Indian blood from her, even if Xavier wasn't part Indian
himself.  And me, I'd rather have kin that et berries and fresh
pickerel than Edgar's folks, that never had anything but codfish--
dried--and that's how they all come to look so dry themselves."

"Mine didn't eat boiled dog, like you Chippewas," said Edgar.  "And
far's Neil's concerned, my folks are HIS folks, codfish and all,
just as much as your folks is, ain't they?"

"That's what you think!  Anyway, if you like it or not, Neil,
whether you're a wild Injun or not, you're descended from Xavier
Pic, the smartest man on the frontier, and that's pretty good,
hey?"

"Oh, yes, Gramma, that's fine!"

But his new-found Indian blood impressed him more than M. Pic's
"smartness."

He was recalling that, as a small boy, from some forgotten hint or
other of Gramma Julie, he had for a while considered himself to
have a warlike Indian streak in him.  He had boasted of it to
Ackley Wargate, and that pale scion had been envious.  Yes, a royal
heritage, Chippewa bravery; a people unafraid of rocks and
nightfall and creeping enemies.

But still--

That might be fine for most people, but not for the conformable
husband of Vestal Beehouse.  And he was unhappy to suspect that his
rare Biddy, that bright being of crystal and rose and silver, was
less certainly cousin to English princesses and to demoiselles in
robes broidered with the golden lilies than to unbathed squaws in
shirts of branded flour-sacking.

--Wonder how many Indian kids running around reservations and
picking nits out of their hair can claim to be Biddy's cousins?

--Oh, let 'em claim it!  Might be good for her and me to have some
honest-to-God primitive American in us! . . .  Mr. and Mrs. Neil
Injunblood announce the engagement of their daughter, Elizabeth
Running Mink, to John Pierpont Morgan Wargate, and damn lucky that
little prig would be to get her!

He remembered a Christmas grocery calendar and the portrait of an
Indian maid with whom, in boyhood, he had been in love: a slim maid
complete with riband, beaded doeskin jacket, canoe, waterfall, pine
forest, and moonlight, and she seemed not too feeble a symbol
beside the fair but weak-minded Elaine simpering over the Camelot
traffic.

At last he spoke, and briskly.

"Okay, Gramma, I'm a Chippewa.  Do Chippewas get a drink?"

Grampa Edgar cackled, "They do not.  They ain't safe, after
firewater, and they get nothing but fried beaver-tails.  But any
grandson of Ed Saxinar gets a drink--gets two drinks!"



12


He said nothing about Chippewas when he returned to Grand Republic.
What had seemed a cheery topic with Gramma Julie did not go well
with Vestal's Junior League airiness.  He tried to pump his
parents, and he guessed that neither of them knew anything about
his mother's ancestry.  If Faith had ever known, in her gentle
estrangement from Gramma Julie she had conveniently forgotten.

And Julie had given no proof that either Xavier Pic or his wife was
Indian, Neil insisted.  He insisted a little too often and too
strongly.

He kept wondering about the sacred Biddy as a vessel for Indian
blood.  He had a new, anxious way of watching that Saxon child, and
comparing her with her playmates.  He decided that Biddy was
rougher and more practical than the other children, and in a
sidelight, at dusk, he imagined a copper shade on her camellia
cheeks.

Biddy, he noted, was abnormally good at playing that the living-
room couch was a canoe and paddling it with a tennis racket--with
no especial advantage to the racket; she was masterful at walking
stealthily, at breaking out in ungodly whoops; and when she and he
built a bonfire to celebrate the thaw at the end of April, he noted
that both of them were competent with hatchet and bark kindling.

--Maybe this isn't just a game.  I really do see Indian traits in
both of us.

Then, as he watched Vestal sewing beads in a small pair of
moccasins for Biddy, he absent-mindedly observed, "Only an Indian
would think up patterns like that."  He remembered then it was not
the Beehousely Vestal who was to be studied and detected as an
Indian, and he saw how sumptuously spurious all his discoveries had
been.  And he most illogically triumphed, proved that neither he
nor Biddy really did have "Indian blood."

But even if they had--well, he now remembered hearing that the
admirable Judge Cass Timberlane was part Sioux, and that it was
something or other called the "genes" which carried racial
appearances, not the blood.

Learnedly summing it all up, Neil decided that (1), he probably had
no Indian blood or Indian genes or whatever it was and (2), it
wouldn't matter if he had, but (3), he wouldn't mention it to
Vestal and (4), recalling Gramma Julie's swarthy gracefulness, he
was sure that Biddy and he were as Indian as Sitting Bull, and (5),
he had now completely lost interest in the subject and (6), he was
going to find out for certain, as soon as he could, whether he did
have any Indian blood and/or genes.



His second business trip to Minneapolis was on Monday, May 7th, and
on that day exploded the premature announcement, confirmed a day
later, of peace with Germany.  While the motor-horns and the flat-
voiced church bells were strident in prairie villages along the
railway, the car Borup was blazing with jubilation.  Strangers
shook hands and drank from pocket-flasks together and patted Mac
the porter on the shoulder and, all standing, they sang "Auld Lang
Syne."

Judd and Eliot and Rod Aldwick would be coming back now, Neil
rejoiced.  He would no longer be friendless and unadvised.  It was
only, he assured himself, because he had been lonely that he had
"taken this Indian nonsense so seriously."

But Jamie Wargate would not be coming back.  No one would find out
where he lay in Germany, under an airplane engine, his fine hands a
pulp that was one with the battered steel.

Neil's friend of the transport, Captain Ellerton, would not be
coming back.  He, least prim of all young men, was prim now under a
prim cross in a graveyard like a suburban lawn.



His talks with the Minneapolis bankers and politicians done, Neil
marched himself over to St. Paul, on Wednesday morning, to see Dr.
Werweiss, official in the Minnesota Historical Society, whose
building was beside the great bubble of the Capitol dome.

Dr. Werweiss was in his office, a friendly and learned-looking man,
and Neil spoke to him casually, without quite knowing that he was
planning to lie.

"I served as a captain in Italy, and one of my men has returned,
wounded, and he's been begging me to ask somebody here about a
pioneer ancestor of his--a trader named Xavier Pic, round 1830."

"I don't recall the name just now.  Was it spelled P-E-A-K-E?"

"No, P-I-C, I believe.  I suppose it could be a corruption of
Picardy?" Neil said hopefully.

"Ye-es, I suppose it could be."

"Well, this G.I., this soldier, would like to find out if there's
any authoritative record of old Xavier in your documents.  He was
born about 1790, this fellow thinks, maybe born in France.  I
gather he'd especially like to know whether Xavier was pure French,
or part Indian, also--that is, what race it would make this fellow
himself."

"Did you feel that your soldier would be pleased if he proved to be
part Indian, Mr. Kingsblood, or is he one of these simple-minded
Croix de Feu racialists?"

"A--?  Oh, yes, he--  What?  Oh, I don't know.  I don't believe I
went into that with him--not thoroughly, I mean."

"If you'll wait a few moments, Mr. Kingsblood?"

Dr. Werweiss returned with an aged manuscript book.  "I'm on
Monsieur Pic's trail, I think."

"You are?"  It was the second of waiting before the judge's
sentence.

Dr. Werweiss was casual.  "I've found him here in Taliaferro's
diary.  Yes.  'X. Pic.'  May be the same one--helped arrest a bad
Indian, it seems.  But Major Taliaferro doesn't say whether Pic had
any Indian blood himself or not.  Of course, if he was born in
France, he wouldn't have, unless his father had brought a squaw
wife home from Canada, which did happen, but not frequently."

Neil was relieved, and ashamed of being relieved, and relieved
again that Biddy and Biddy's father were uncorrupted Caucasians.

"But," Dr. Werweiss went on, "whether Pic had Indian blood or not,
he did marry a Chippewa wife."

--Oh, blast it!  I forgot all about great-great-great-grandmama,
bless her tanned hide!  Why didn't Xavier stay home in France or
New Orleans or wherever he belonged, curse his itching feet!  What
did I ever do to him, a century and a quarter ago, to make him do
this to me?

Then, all unconscious and benign, Dr. Werweiss let him have it:

"No, I think it's very doubtful that Xavier Pic was part Indian,
because--now I don't know whether you'll consider it wise to tell
your inquiring veteran or not; so many people do have vulgar
superstitions about race; but the fact is that your friend's
ancestor, Xavier, is mentioned by Major Taliaferro as being a full-
blooded Negro."

Neil's face could not have changed, for Dr. Werweiss went on, quite
cheerfully, "Of course you know that in most Southern states and a
few Northern ones, a 'Negro' is defined, by statute, as a person
having even 'one drop of Negro blood,' and according to that
barbaric psychology, your soldier friend and any children he may
have, no matter how white they look, are legally one-hundred-
percent Negroes."

Neil was thinking less of himself than of his golden Biddy.



13


He found himself sitting at a lunch-counter, gravely staring at the
wet slab of wood, the catsup bottle, the tricky nickel holder of
paper napkins.  He was vague, but he did remember that Dr. Werweiss
was to make further search for him, that he was to return to the
Society at two, and that he had not admitted anything.

He was in a still horror, beyond surprise now, like a man who has
learned that last night, walking in his sleep, he murdered a man,
that the police are looking for him.

He was apparently eating a sandwich.  He regarded it with
astonishment.  How had he ever ordered a thing like that, dirty
hunks of bread piled around flat-tasting ham?  And the lunchroom
was stinking, an offense against God and the sweet May afternoon.

--Why did I ever come in here?  But I better try and like it.  This
is the kind of dump I'll get from now on.  Or worse.  Probably even
this joint thinks it's too elegant to serve us niggers.

It was the first time that he had put what he was into a word, and
he was too sick to soften it to "Negroes," and anyway, the word
seemed so trivial beside the fact.  He was protesting that he
should be called a black man or a green man or any kind of a man
except the plain human and multicolored kind of man that, as Neil
Kingsblood, he always had been and always would be.

But THEY would say that he was a black man, a Negro.

To Neil, to be a Negro was to be a Belfreda Gray or a Borus
Bugdoll; to be Mac the porter, obsequious to white pawnbrokers; to
be a leering black stevedore on the docks at Naples, wearing an
American uniform but not allowed to have a gun, allowed only to
stagger and ache with shouldering enormous boxes; to be a field-
hand under the Delta sun, under the torchlight in salvation orgies,
an animal with none of the animal freedom from shame; to be an
assassin on Beale Street or a clown dancing in a saloon for pennies
and humiliation.

To be a Negro was to live in a decaying shanty or in a frame
tenement like a foul egg-crate, and to wear either slapping old
shoes or the shiny toothpicks of a procurer; to sleep on unchanged
bedclothes that were like funguses, and to have for spiritual
leader only a howling and lecherous swindler.

There were practically no other kinds of Negroes.  Had he not heard
so from his Georgia army doctor?

To be a Negro, once they found you out, no matter how pale you
were, was to work in kitchens--always in other people's thankless
kitchens--or in choking laundries or fever-hot foundries or at
shoeshine stands where the disdainful white gentry thought about
spitting down on you.

To be a Negro was to be unable--biologically, fundamentally,
unchangeably unable--to grasp any science beyond addition and plain
cooking and the driving of a car, any philosophy beyond comic
dream-books.  It was to be mysteriously unable ever to take a bath,
so that you were more offensive than the animals who clean
themselves.

It was to have such unpleasant manners, invariably, that you were
never admitted to the dining-table of any decent house nor to the
assemblies of most labor unions which, objectionable though they
were to a conscientious banker like himself, still did have enough
sense to see that all Negroes are scabs and spies and loafers.

It was to be an animal physically.  It was to be an animal
culturally, deaf to Beethoven and St. Augustine.  It was to be an
animal ethically, unable to keep from stealing and violence, from
lying and treachery.  It was literally and altogether to be an
animal, somewhere between human beings and the ape.

It was to know that your children, no matter how much you loved
them or strove for them, no matter if they were fair as Biddy, were
doomed to be just as ugly and treacherous and brainless and bestial
as yourself, and their children's children beyond them forever,
under the curse of Ezekiel.

--But I'm not like that--Mum isn't--Biddy isn't--old Julie isn't.
We're decent, regular people.  So there's some mistake.  We aren't
Negroes, not one drop, and there were two Xavier Pics.

--You know that's phony, Kingsblood.  Somehow, you know, way down,
that he was your ancestor.  Oh, damn him for being black!  Poor
sweet Biddy!

--All right.  If Bid is a Negro, then everything I've ever heard
about the Negroes--yes, and maybe everything I've heard about the
Jews and the Japs and the Russians, about religion and politics--
all of that may be a lie, too.

--If you ARE a Negro, you be one and fight as one.  See if you can
grow up, and then fight.

--But I've got to learn what a Negro is; I've got to learn, from
the beginning, what I am!

Behind his struggle to think rationally there was a picture of the
pert and candid face of Biddy--the little Duchess of Picardy, royal
heir of Catherine of Aragon--and of her being unmasked by jeering
neighbors as a Negro--a nigger, a zigaboo, a disgusting imitation
of a real human child, flat-headed and obscenely capering,
something to be driven around to the back door.

--She's not like that.  We're not like that.  Negroes are not like
that.  Are we?



Dr. Werweiss, he informed Neil, had found an original letter from
Xavier Pic to General Henry Sibley, and he handed it over.

The paper had turned brown, but the ink was unfaded and the script
delicate and precise, the writing of a literate man.  Neil wondered
if he was not the first, except for Dr. Werweiss and his assistant
and General Sibley, who had touched this letter since Xavier had
written it, by candlelight or northern sun, on a puncheon table or
the side of a birch canoe, a hundred dead years ago:

"When you were here, honored General, and I had the priviledge to
entertain you with a little fish and tea, more worthy fare being
beyond my powers in the wilderness, I told you I am to all intent a
full-blooded negro born in Martinique, though maybe I have a very
little French and Portuguese and Spanish blood, too, not much.

"My wife was a good Ojibway woman and now my dear dauter Sidonie
has married a Frenchman, Louis Payzold, and while I am proud of the
negroes, they are such a brave passionat people, the Southern
States have made a curse of life to the dark people and I do not
want to have Sidonie or her children to be known as blacks and to
suffer as my people do suffer there and planely told they are
beasts.  I ask for her little ones only a chance.  So please always
refer to me now as French.

"I am getting a little old for wilderness work and my purposes are
almost done and do not want to think of my grandchildren under the
lash, so please not say anything about my color and how black it
is, honored General Sibley.

"Though Indian ladies seem to admire the color very much and all
the warriors say I am first white man ever come to their country.
Mes estimes les plus distinguees.

"X. Pic."


Dr. Werweiss spoke:

"He sounds like a grand old fellow--lot nobler than the Sieur de
Saint Lusson or any of the other Parisian courtiers who showed up
on the frontier.  If your soldier friend has the guts to take it,
and the imagination, he can be pretty proud of his ancestor.

"You know, it's true, what he says.  Only red men and white men
were recognized by the Indians on the Northern frontier, and so
Negroes like Xavier and the Bongas were the first 'white men' to
carry civilization--meaning the bottle, the bomb, and the Bible--to
the poor heathen.  They were like Perry opening up Japan, and if
the results have been just as disastrous, that wasn't their fault.

"What a kingly set of names the whole bunch of them had:  Sidonie
marrying a Louis, and we found that their son, though we found
nothing more about him, was royally named Alexandre!"

It was the chain as Gramma Julie had given it to him:  Xavier,
Sidonie, Louis Payzold, Alexandre, and, if he told the world of it,
that chain bound him, bound Biddy.

IF he told.



--And I was so certain (he thought on the interurban car back to
Minneapolis) that Xavier had a short, golden beard!

--Me, with my red hair, even a drop of blackness?  Or Biddy?
Still, Gramma Julie is dark enough.  O God, even to have to think
about it!

--What's this about colored people "passing," if they're light
enough?  I certainly shall.  Why should I be so conceited as to
imagine that God has specially called me to be a martyr?  And
pretty vicious kind of a martyr, that would sacrifice his mother
and his daughter to his holy vanity!  Everything can be just as it
was.  It HAS to be, for Biddy's sake.  You wouldn't deliberately
turn your own mother into an outcast, would you?

--A man couldn't do that!

--But what if a lot of people know it already?  Or can detect the
Negro in me?  I hear lots of Southerners claim they can do that.
That man goggling at me down the car--can he see I'm part Negro?
Has everybody always guessed it?



14


He crossed the lobby of his hotel in Minneapolis with his eyes
rigidly held on the black-and-white marble of the floor, irritably
noting that it WAS black and white, careful as a drunk who betrays
himself by being too careful in his gait.  He was wondering who
might be staring at him, suspecting the Negro in him.  Wilbur
Feathering, who was a food-dealer in Grand Republic but who had
been born in Mississippi, frequently asserted that he could catch
any "Nigra" who passed for white, even if he was but a sixty-fourth
black.  If Wilbur did detect it, he would be nasty about it.

Right in the center of the lobby he wanted to stop and look at his
hands.  He remembered hearing that a Negro of any degree, though
pale of face as Narcissus, is betrayed by the blue halfmoo