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probably grin and ask you who is taking your girl to the Mardi Gras ball. The particular Jelly-bean patch
which produced the protagonist of this history lies somewhere between the two--a little city of forty
thousand that has dozed sleepily for forty thousand years in southern Georgia, occasionally stirring in its
slumbers and muttering something about a war that took place sometime, somewhere, and that everyone else
has forgotten long ago.
Jim was a Jelly-bean. I write that again because it has such a pleasant sound--rather like the beginning of a
fairy story--as if Jim were nice. It somehow gives me a picture of him with a round, appetizing face and all
sorts of leaves and vegetables growing out of his cap. But Jim was long and thin and bent at the waist from
stooping over pool-tables, and he was what might have been known in the indiscriminating North as a corner
loafer. "Jelly-bean" is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life
conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular--I am idling, I have idled, I will idle.
Jim was born in a white house on a green corner. It had four weather-beaten pillars in front and a great
amount of lattice-work in the rear that made a cheerful criss-cross background for a flowery sun-drenched
lawn. Originally the dwellers in the white house had owned the ground next door and next door to that and
next door to that, but this had been so long ago that even Jim's father scarcely remembered it. He had, in fact,
thought it a matter of so little moment that when he was dying from a pistol wound got in a brawl he
neglected even to tell little Jim, who was five years old and miserably frightened. The white house became a
boarding-house run by a tight-lipped lady from Macon, whom Jim called Aunt Mamie and detested with all
his soul.
He became fifteen, went to high school, wore his hair in black snarls, and was afraid of girls. He hated his
home where four women and one old man prolonged an interminable chatter from summer to summer about
what lots the Powell place had originally included and what sort of flowers would be out next. Sometimes the
parents of little girls in town, remembering Jim's mother and fancying a resemblance in the dark eyes and
hair, invited him to parties, but parties made him shy and he much preferred sitting on a disconnected axle in
Tilly's Garage, rolling the bones or exploring his mouth endlessly with a long straw. For pocket money, he
picked up odd jobs, and it was due to this that he stopped going to parties. At his third party little Marjorie
Haight had whispered indiscreetly and within hearing distance that he was a boy who brought the groceries
sometimes. So instead of the two-step and polka, Jim had learned to throw any number he desired on the dice
and had listened to spicy tales of all the shootings that had occurred in the surrounding country during the
past fifty years.
He became eighteen. The war broke out and he enlisted as a gob and polished brass in the Charleston
Navy-yard for a year. Then, by way of variety, he went North and polished brass in the Brooklyn Navy-yard
for a year.
When the war was over he came home. He was twenty-one, his trousers were too short and too tight. His
buttoned shoes were long and narrow. His tie was an alarming conspiracy of purple and pink marvellously
scrolled, and over it were two blue eyes faded like a piece of very good old cloth long exposed to the sun.
The Jelly-Bean 43
 The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories
In the twilight of one April evening when a soft gray had drifted down along the cotton fields and over the
sultry town, he was a vague figure leaning against a board fence, whistling and gazing at the moon's rim
above the lights of Jackson Street. His mind was working persistently on a problem that had held his attention
for an hour. The Jelly-bean had been invited to a party.
Back in the days when all the boys had detested all the girls, Clark Darrow and Jim had sat side by side in
school. But, while Jim's social aspirations had died in the oily air of the garage, Clark had alternately fallen in
and out of love, gone to college, taken to drink, given it up, and, in short, become one of the best beaux of the
town. Nevertheless Clark and Jim had retained a friendship that, though casual, was perfectly definite. That
afternoon Clark's ancient Ford had slowed up beside Jim, who was on the sidewalk and, out of a clear sky,
Clark had invited him to a party at the country club. The impulse that made him do this was no stranger than
the impulse which made Jim accept. The latter was probably an unconscious ennui, a half-frightened sense of
adventure. And now Jim was soberly thinking it over.
He began to sing, drumming his long foot idly on a stone block in the sidewalk till it wobbled up and down in
time to the low throaty tune:
"One mile from home in Jelly-bean town,
Lives Jeanne, the Jelly-bean Queen.
She loves her dice and treats 'em nice;
No dice would treat her mean."
He broke off and agitated the sidewalk to a bumpy gallop.
"Daggone!" he muttered, half aloud.
They would all be there--the old crowd, the crowd to which, by right of the white house, sold long since, and
the portrait of the officer in gray over the mantel, Jim should have belonged. But that crowd had grown up
together into a tight little set as gradually as the girls' dresses had lengthened inch by inch, as definitely as the
boys' trousers had dropped suddenly to their ankles. And to that society of first names and dead puppy-loves
Jim was an outsider--a running mate of poor whites. Most of the men knew him, condescendingly; he tipped
his hat to three or four girls. That was all.
When the dusk had thickened into a blue setting for the moon, he walked through the hot, pleasantly pungent
town to Jackson Street. The stores were closing and the last shoppers were drifting homeward, as if borne on
the dreamy revolution of a slow merry-go-round. A street-fair farther down made a brilliant alley of
vari-colored booths and contributed a blend of music to the night--an oriental dance on a calliope, a
melancholy bugle in front of a freak show, a cheerful rendition of "Back Home in Tennessee" on a
hand-organ.
The Jelly-bean stopped in a store and bought a collar. Then he sauntered along toward Soda Sam's, where he
found the usual three or four cars of a summer evening parked in front and the little darkies running back and
forth with sundaes and lemonades.
"Hello, Jim."
It was a voice at his elbow--Joe Ewing sitting in an automobile with Marylyn Wade. Nancy Lamar and a
strange man were in the back seat.
The Jelly-bean tipped his hat quickly.
The Jelly-Bean 44
 The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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