Word: jezebels
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...last an empty stomach induced him to try to make a living. So he enlisted as butler in the family of a puisne judge. There he learned to put on style, and as the gayest and sassiest man on the island he became a wooer of the local belle, Jezebel Pettyfer. At this flowing tide of his affairs he lost his position because of an unfortunate argument with his mistress over the disposition of the cadaver of her lamented dog Aristotle. That same night he proposed to Jezebel, offering her Jehu Sennacherib Dyle in holy matrimony. Jezebel, though coy, finally...
...Dyle lived on Jezebel's earnings, augmenting them occasionally by borrowing a neighbor's hen, until one day she mistakenly guessed he was untrue and reported him to the police for thieving. While he was in jail she entered into holy wedlock with a rumshop keeper from Jamaica and sailed away with her husband. Released at last Dyle joined the Zouaves and shortly he too was transferred to Jamaica. There he cut a sumptuous figure. He was the best man in Port Royal and in much demand at weddings. He was a most successful gambler...
Meanwhile Jezebel was leading her husband a merry chase. Finally the poor rumshop keeper, rising in wrath, fell with the knife of an English sailor in his side. After nine days' mourning, Jezebel blossomed forth in magenta, and the handsome widow was soon an object of hate to all the married women of the island and a landmark of delight to visiting sailor...
What with Jezebel's "gigglin' fine ways" and Dyle's witty tongue and proclivity for "borrowing" things, developments were almost bound to come about in the society of the neighborhood, but after all matters went on just about as they had in Barbadoes before Dyle's mother set out for Colon with her friend the skipper...
...last century and consigned to comparative obscurity, but its complete realism might tag it as written yesterday. Haldane Macfall wrote of Negro life in all its comic fullness, yet refused to write the regulation Negro comic story. Saith Carl Van Vechten, according to the blurb: "The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer is probably the best novel yet written about the Negro." And Critic Van Vechten is not far wrong, for Haldane Macfall can write. He has an extraordinarily observant eye and an equally effective pen. He has the turn of the epigrammatist, but makes no ostentatious display...