The semi-daily passings of Cissie Dildine before the old Renfrew manor
on her way to and from the Arkwright home upset Peter Siner's working
schedule to an extraordinary degree.
After watching for two or three days, Peter worked out a sort of time-
table for Cissie. She passed up early in the morning, at about five
forty-five. He could barely see her then, and somehow she looked very
pathetic hurrying along in the cold, dim light of dawn. After she had
cooked the Arkwright breakfast, swept the Arkwright floors, dusted the
Arkwright furniture, she passed back toward Niggertown, somewhere near
nine. About eleven o'clock she went up to cook dinner, and returned at
one or two in the afternoon. Occasionally, she made a third trip to get
supper.
This was as exactly as Peter could predict the arrivals and departures
of Cissie, and the schedule involved a large margin of uncertainty. For
half an hour before Cissie passed she kept Peter watching the clock at
nervous intervals, wondering if, after all, she had gone by unobserved.
Invariably, he would move his work to a window where he had the whole
street under his observation. Then he would proceed with his indexing
with more and more difficulty. At first the paragraphs would lose
connection, and he would be forced to reread them. Then the sentences
would drop apart. Immediately before the girl arrived, the words
themselves grew anarchic. They stared him in the eye, each a complete
entity, self-sufficient, individual, bearing no relation to any other
words except that of mere proximity,--like a spelling lesson. Only by an
effort could Peter enforce a temporary cohesion among them, and they
dropped apart at the first slackening of the strain.
Strange to say, when the octoroon actually was walking past, Peter did
not look at her steadily. On the contrary, he would think to himself:
"How little I care for such a woman! My ideal is thus and so--" He would
look at her until she glanced across the yard and saw him sitting in the
window; then immediately he bent over his books, as if his stray glance
had lighted on her purely by chance, as if she were nothing more to him
than a passing dray or a fluttering leaf. Indeed, he told himself during
these crises that he had no earthly interest in the girl, that she was
not the sort of woman he desired,--while his heart hammered, and the
lines of print under his eyes blurred into gray streaks across the page.
One afternoon Peter saw Cissie pass his gate, hurrying, almost running,
apparently in flight from something. It sent a queer shock through him.
He stared after her, then up and down the street. He wondered why she
ran. Even when he went to bed that night the strangeness of Cissie's
flight kept him awake inventing explanations.
* * * * *
None of Peter's preoccupations was lost upon Captain Renfrew. None is so
suspicious as a credulous man aroused. After Rose had struck her blow at
the secretary, the old gentleman noted all of Peter's permutations and
misconstrued a dozen quite innocent actions on Peter's part into signs
of bad faith.
By a little observation he identified Cissie Dildine and what he saw did
not reëstablish his peace of mind. On the contrary, it became more than
probable that the cream-colored negress would lure Peter away. This
possibility aroused in the old lawyer a grim, voiceless rancor against
Cissie. In his thoughts he linked the girl with every manner of evil
design against Peter. She was an adventuress, a Cyprian, a seductress
attempting to snare Peter in the brazen web of her comeliness. For to
the old gentleman's eyes there was an abiding impudicity about Cissie's
very charms. The passionate repose of her face was immodest; the
possession of a torso such as a sculptor might have carved was brazen.
The girl was shamefully well appointed.
One morning as Captain Renfrew came home from town, he chanced to walk
just behind the octoroon, and quite unconsciously the girl delivered an
added fillip to the old gentleman's uneasiness.
Just before Cissie passed in front of the Renfrew manor, womanlike, she
paused to make some slight improvements in her appearance before walking
under the eyes of her lover. She adjusted some strands of hair which had
blown loose in the autumn wind, looked at herself in a purse mirror,
retouched her nose with her greenish powder; then she picked a little
sprig of sumac leaves that burned in the corner of a lawn and pinned its
flame on the unashamed loveliness of her bosom.
This negro instinct for brilliant color is the theme of many jests in
the South, but it is entirely justified esthetically, although the
constant sarcasm of the whites has checked its satisfaction, if it has
not corrupted the taste.
The bit of sumac out of which the octoroon had improvised a nosegay
lighted up her skin and eyes, and created an ensemble as closely
resembling a Henri painting as anything the streets of Hooker's Bend
were destined to see.
But old Captain Renfrew was far from appreciating any such bravura in
scarlet and gold. At first he put it down to mere niggerish taste, and
his dislike for the girl edged his stricture; then, on second thought,
the oddness of sumac for a nosegay caught his attention. Nobody used
sumac for a buttonhole. He had never heard of any woman, white or black,
using sumac for a bouquet. Why should this Cissie Dildine trig herself
out in sumac?
The Captain's suspicions came to a point like a setter. He began
sniffing about for Cissie's motives in choosing so queer an ornament. He
wondered if it had anything to do with Peter Siner.
All his life, Captain Renfrew's brain had been deliberate. He moved
mentally, as he did physically, with dignity. To tell the truth, the
Captain's thoughts had a way of absolutely stopping now and then, and
for a space he would view the world as a simple collection of colored
surfaces without depth or meaning. During these intervals, by a sort of
irony of the gods the old gentleman's face wore a look of philosophic
concentration, so that his mental hiatuses had given him a reputation
for profundity, which was county wide. It had been this, years before,
that had carried him by a powerful majority into the Tennessee
legislature. The voters agreed, almost to a man, that they preferred
depth to a shallow facility. The rival candidate had been shallow and
facile. The polls returned the Captain, and the young gentleman--for the
Captain was a young gentleman in those days--was launched on a typical
politician's career. But some Republican member from east Tennessee had
impugned the rising statesman's honor with some sort of improper
liaison. In those days there seemed to be proper and improper liaisons.
There had been a duel on the banks of the Cumberland River in which the
Captain succeeded in wounding his traducer in the arm, and was thus
vindicated by the gods. But the incident ended a career that might very
well have wound up in the governor's chair, or even in the United States
Senate, considering how very deliberate the Captain was mentally.
To-day, as the Captain walked up the street following Cissie Dildine,
one of these vacant moods fell upon him and it was not until they had
reached his own gate that it suddenly occurred to the old gentleman just
what Cissie's sumac did mean. It was a signal to Peter. The simplicity
of the solution stirred the old man. Its meaning was equally easy to
fathom. When a woman signals any man it conveys consent. Denials receive
no signals; they are inferred. In this particular case Captain Renfrew
found every reason to believe that this flaring bit of sumac was the
prelude to an elopement.
In the window of his library the Captain saw his secretary staring at
his cards and books with an intentness plainly assumed. Peter's fixed
stare had none of those small movements of the head that mark genuine
intellectual labor. So Peter was posing, pretending he did not see the
girl, to disarm his employer's suspicions,--pretending not to see a
girl rigged out like that!
Such duplicity sent a queer spasm of anguish through the old lawyer.
Peter's action held half a dozen barbs for the Captain. A fellow-alumnus
of Harvard staying in his house merely for his wage and keep! Peter bore
not the slightest affection for him; the mulatto lacked even the
chivalry to notify the Captain of his intentions, because he knew the
Captain objected. And yet all these self-centered objections were
nothing to what old Captain Renfrew felt for Peter's own sake. For Peter
to marry a nigger and a strumpet, for him to elope with a wanton and a
thief! For such an upstanding lad, the very picture of his own virility
and mental alertness when he was of that age, for such a boy to fling
himself away, to drop out of existence--oh, it was loathly!
The old man entered the library feeling sick. It was empty. Peter had
gone to his room, according to his custom. But in this particular
instance it seemed to Captain Renfrew his withdrawal was flavored with a
tang of guilt. If he were innocent, why should not such a big, strong
youth have stayed and helped an old gentleman off with his overcoat?
The old Captain blew out a windy breath as he helped himself out of his
coat in the empty library. The bent globe still leaned against the
window-seat. The room had never looked so somber or so lonely.
At dinner the old man ate so little that Rose Hobbett ceased her
monotonous grumbling to ask if he felt well. He said he had had a hard
day, a difficult day. He felt so weak and thin that he foretold the gray
days when he could no longer creep to the village and sit with his
cronies at the livery-stable, when he would be house-fast, through
endless days, creeping from room to room like a weak old rat in a huge
empty house, finally to die in some disgusting fashion. And Now Peter
was going to leave him, was going to throw himself away on a lascivious
wench. A faint moisture dampened the old man's withered eyes. He drank
an extra thimbleful of whisky to try to hearten himself. Its bouquet
filled the time-worn stateliness of the dining-room.
* * * * *
During the weeks of Peter's stay at the manor it had grown to be the
Captain's habit really to write for two or three hours in the afternoon,
and his pile of manuscript had thickened under his application.
The old man was writing a book called "Reminiscences of Peace and War."
His book would form another unit of that extraordinary crop of personal
reminiscences of the old South which flooded the presses of America
during the decade of 1908-18. During just that decade it seemed as if the
aged men and women of the South suddenly realized that the generation who
had lived through the picturesqueness and stateliness of the old slave
régime was almost gone, and over their hearts swept a common impulse to
commemorate, in the sunset of their own lives, its fading splendor and
its vanished deeds.
On this particular afternoon the Captain settled himself to work, but
his reminiscences did not get on. He pinched a bit of floss from the nib
of his pen and tried to swing into the period of which he was writing.
He read over a few pages of his copy as mental priming, but his thoughts
remained flat and dull. Indeed, his whole life, as he reviewed it in the
waning afternoon, appeared empty and futile. It seemed hardly worth
while to go on.
The Captain had come to that point in his memoirs where the Republican
representative from Knox County had set going the petard which had
wrecked his political career.
From the very beginnings of his labors the old lawyer had looked forward
to writing just this period of his life. He meant to clear up his name
once for all. He meant to use invective, argument, testimony and a
powerful emotional appeal, such as a country lawyer invariably attempts
with a jury.
But now that he had arrived at the actual composition of his defense, he
sat biting his penholder, with all the arguments he meant to advance
slipped from his mind. He could not recall the points of the proof. He
could not recall them with Peter Siner moving restlessly about the room,
glancing through the window, unsettled, nervous, on the verge of eloping
with a negress.
His secretary's tragedy smote the old man. The necessity of doing
something for Peter put his thoughts to rout. A wild idea occurred to
the Captain that if he should write the exact truth, perhaps his memoirs
might serve Peter as a signal against a futile, empty journey.
But the thought no sooner appeared than it was rejected. In the Anglo-
Saxon, especially the Anglo-Saxon of the Southern United States, abides
no such Gallic frankness as moved a Jean-Jacques. Southern memoirs
always sound like the conversation between two maiden ladies,--nothing
intimate, simply a few general remarks designed to show from what nice
families they came.
So the Captain wrote nothing. During all the afternoon he sat at his
desk with a leaden heart, watching Peter move about the room. The old
man maintained more or less the posture of writing, but his thoughts
were occupied in pitying himself and pitying Peter. Half a dozen times
he looked up, on the verge of making some plea, some remonstrance,
against the madness of this brown man. But the sight of Peter sitting in
the window-seat staring out into the street silenced him. He was a weak
old man, and Peter's nerves were strung with the desire of youth.
At last the two men heard old Rose clashing in the kitchen. A few
minutes later the secretary excused himself from the library, to go to
his own room. As Peter was about to pass through the door, the Captain
was suddenly galvanized into action by the thought that this perhaps was
the last time he would ever see him. He got up from his chair and called
shakenly to Peter. The negro paused. The Captain moistened his lips and
controlled his voice.
"I want to have a word with you, Peter, about a--a little matter. I--
I've mentioned it before."
"Yes, sir." The negro's tone and attitude reminded the Captain that the
supper gong would soon sound and they would best separate at once.
"It--it's about Cissie Dildine," the old lawyer hurried on.
Peter nodded slightly.
"Yes, you mentioned that before."
The old man lifted a thin hand as if to touch Peter's arm, but he did
not. A sort of desperation seized him.
"But listen, Peter, you don't want to do--what's in your mind!"
"What is in my mind, Captain?"
"I mean marry a negress. You don't want to marry a negress!"
The brown man stared, utterly blank.
"Not marry a negress!"
"No, Peter; no," quavered the old man. "For yourself it may make no
difference, but your children--think of your children, your son growing
up under a brown veil! You can't tear it off. God himself can't tear it
off! You can never reach him through it. Your children, your children's
children, a terrible procession that stretches out and out, marching
under a black shroud, unknowing, unknown! All you can see are their sad
forms beneath the shroud, marching away--marching away. God knows where!
And yet it's your own flesh and blood!"
Suddenly the old lawyer's face broke into the hard, tearless contortions
of the aged. His terrible emotion communicated itself to the sensitive
brown man.
"But, Captain, I myself am a negro. Whom should I marry?"
"No one; no one! Let your seed wither in your loins! It's better to do
that; it's better--" At that moment the clashing of the supper gong fell
on the old man's naked nerves. He straightened up by some reflex
mechanism, turned away from what he thought was his last interview with
his secretary, and proceeded down the piazza into the great empty
dining-room.