“And I knows just the place!” she cried
eagerly, looking at him with a flash of the old teasing
mischief—“down in the heart of the
swamp—where dreams and devils lives.”
* * * *
*
Up at the school-house Miss Taylor was musing.
She had been invited to spend the summer with Mrs.
Grey at Lake George, and such a summer!—silken
clothes and dainty food, motoring and golf, well-groomed
men and elegant women. She would not have put
it in just that way, but the vision came very close
to spelling heaven to her mind. Not that she
would come to it vacant-minded, but rather as a trained
woman, starved for companionship and wanting something
of the beauty and ease of life. She sat dreaming
of it here with rows of dark faces before her, and
the singsong wail of a little black reader with his
head aslant and his patched kneepants.
The day was warm and languorous, and the last pale
mist of the Silver Fleece peeped in at the windows.
She tried to follow the third-reader lesson with her
finger, but persistently off she went, dreaming, to
some exquisite little parlor with its green and gold,
the clink of dainty china and hum of low voices, and
the blue lake in the window; she would glance up,
the door would open softly and—
Just here she did glance up, and all the school glanced
with her. The drone of the reader hushed.
The door opened softly, and upon the threshold stood
Zora. Her small feet and slender ankles were black
and bare; her dark, round, and broad-browed head and
strangely beautiful face were poised almost defiantly,
crowned with a misty mass of waveless hair, and lit
by the velvet radiance of two wonderful eyes.
And hanging from shoulder to ankle, in formless, clinging
folds, blazed the scarlet gown.
Six
The cry of the naked was sweeping the world.
From the peasant toiling in Russia, the lady lolling
in London, the chieftain burning in Africa, and the
Esquimaux freezing in Alaska; from long lines of hungry
men, from patient sad-eyed women, from old folk and
creeping children went up the cry, “Clothes,
clothes!” Far away the wide black land that belts
the South, where Miss Smith worked and Miss Taylor
drudged and Bles and Zora dreamed, the dense black
land sensed the cry and heard the bound of answering
life within the vast dark breast. All that dark
earth heaved in mighty travail with the bursting bolls
of the cotton while black attendant earth spirits
swarmed above, sweating and crooning to its birth
pains.
After the miracle of the bursting bolls, when the
land was brightest with the piled mist of the Fleece,
and when the cry of the naked was loudest in the mouths
of men, a sudden cloud of workers swarmed between
the Cotton and the Naked, spinning and weaving and
sewing and carrying the Fleece and mining and minting
and bringing the Silver till the Song of Service filled
the world and the poetry of Toil was in the souls of
the laborers. Yet ever and always there were tense
silent white-faced men moving in that swarm who felt
no poetry and heard no song, and one of these was
John Taylor.
