With overwrought nerves Peter Siner entered his room. At five o'clock
that afternoon he had seen Cissie Dildine go up the street to the
Arkwright home to cook one of those occasional suppers. He had been
watching for her return, and in the midst of it the Captain's
extraordinary outburst had stirred him up.
Once in his room, the negro placed the broken Hepplewhite in such a
position that he could rake the street with a glance. Then he tried to
compose himself and await the coming of his supper and the passage of
Cissie. There was something almost pathetic in Peter's endless watching,
all for a mere glimpse or two of the girl in yellow. He himself had no
idea how his nerves and thoughts had woven themselves around the young
woman. He had no idea what a passion this continual doling out of
glimpses had begotten. He did not dream how much he was, as folk naïvely
put it, in love with her.
His love was strong enough to make him forget for a while the old
lawyer's outbreak. However, as the dusk thickened in the shrubbery and
under the trees, certain of the old gentleman's phrases revisited the
mulatto's mind: "A terrible procession ... marching under a black
shroud.... Your children, your children's children, a terrible
procession,... marching away, God knows where.... And yet--it's your own
flesh and blood!" They were terrific sentences, as if the old man had
been trying to tear from his vision some sport of nature, some
deformity. As the implications spread before Peter, he became more and
more astonished at its content. Even to Captain Renfrew black men were
dehumanized,--shrouded, untouchable creatures.
It delivered to Peter a slow but a profound shock. He glanced about at
the faded magnificence of the room with a queer feeling that he had been
introduced into it under a sort of misrepresentation. He had taken up
his abode with the Captain, at least on the basis of belonging to the
human family, but this passionate outbreak, this puzzling explosion, cut
that ground from under his feet.
The more Peter thought about it, the stranger grew his sensation. Not
even to be classed as a human being by this old gentleman who in a weak,
helpless fashion had crept somewhat into Peter's affections,--not to be
considered a man! The mulatto drew a long, troubled breath, and by the
mere mechanics of his desire kept staring through the gloom for Cissie.
Peter Siner had known all along that the unread whites of Hooker's Bend
--and that included nearly every white person in the village--considered
black men as simple animals; but he had supposed that the more thoughtful
men, of whom Captain Renfrew was a type, at least admitted the Afro-
American to the common brotherhood of humanity. But they did not.
As Peter sat staring into the darkness the whole effect of the
dehumanizing of the black folk of the South began to unfold itself
before his imagination. It explained to him the tragedies of his race,
their sufferings at the hand of mob violence; the casualness, even the
levity with which black men were murdered: the chronic dishonesty with
which negroes were treated: the constant enactment of adverse
legislation against them; the cynical use of negro women. They were all
vermin, animals; they were one with the sheep and the swine; a little
nearer the human in form, perhaps, and, oddly enough, one that could be
bred to a human being, as testified a multitude of brown and yellow and
cream-colored folk, but all marching away, as the Captain had so
passionately said, marching away, their forms hidden from human
intercourse under a shroud of black, an endless procession marching
away, God knew whither! And yet they were the South's own flesh and
blood.
The horror of such a complex swelled in Peter's mind to monstrous
proportions. As night thickened at his window, the negro sat dazed and
wondering at the mightiness of his vision. His thoughts went groping,
trying to solve some obscure problem it posed. He thought of the
Arkwright boy; he thought of the white men smiling as his mother's
funeral went past the livery-stable; he thought of Captain Renfrew's
manuscript that he was transcribing. Through all the old man's memoirs
ran a certain lack of sincerity. Peter always felt amid his labors that
the old Captain was making an attorney's plea rather than a candid
exposition. At this point in his thoughts there gradually limned itself
in the brown man's mind the answer to that enigma which he almost had
unraveled on the day he first saw Cissie Dildine pass his window. With
it came the answer to the puzzle contained in the old Captain's library.
The library was not an ordinary compilation of the world's thought; it,
too, was an attorney's special pleading against the equality of man. Any
book or theory that upheld the equality of man was carefully excluded
from the shelves. Darwin's great hypothesis, and every development
springing from it, had been banned, because the moment that a theory was
propounded of the great biologic relationship of all flesh, from worms
to vertebrates, there instantly followed a corollary of the brotherhood
of man.
What Christ did for theology, Darwin did for biology,--he democratized
it. The One descended to man's brotherhood from the Trinity; the other
climbed up to it from the worms.
The old Captain's library lacked sincerity. Southern orthodoxy, which
persists in pouring its religious thought into the outworn molds of
special creation, lacks sincerity. Scarcely a department of Southern
life escapes this fundamental attitude of special pleader and
disingenuousness. It explains the Southern fondness for legal
subtleties. All attempts at Southern poetry, belles-lettres, painting,
novels, bear the stamp of the special plea, of authors whose exposition
is careful.
Peter perceived what every one must perceive, that when letters turn
into a sort of glorified prospectus of a country, all value as
literature ceases. The very breath of art and interpretation is an eager
and sincere searching of the heart. This sincerity the South lacks. Her
single talent will always be forensic, because she is a lawyer with a
cause to defend. And such is the curse that arises from lynchings and
venery and extortions and dehumanizings,--sterility; a dumbness of soul.
Peter Siner's thoughts lifted him with the tremendous buoyancy of
inspiration. He swung out of his chair and began tramping his dark room.
The skin of his scalp tickled as if a ghost had risen before him. The
nerves in his thighs and back vibrated. He felt light, and tingled with
energy.
Unaware of what he was doing, he set about lighting the gasolene-lamp.
He worked with nervous quickness, as if he were in a great hurry.
Presently a brilliant light flooded the room. It turned the gray
illumination of the windows to blackness.
Joy enveloped Peter. His own future developed under his eyes with the
same swift clairvoyance that marked his vision of the ills of his
country. He saw himself remedying those ills. He would go about showing
white men and black men the simple truth, the spiritual necessity for
justice and fairness. It was not a question of social equality; it was a
question of clearing a road for the development of Southern life. He
would show white men that to weaken, to debase, to dehumanize the negro,
inflicted a more terrible wound on the South than would any strength the
black man might develop. He would show black men that to hate the
whites, constantly to suspect, constantly to pilfer from them, only
riveted heavier shackles on their limbs.
It was all so clear and so simple! The white South must humanize the
black not for the sake of the negro, but for the sake of itself. No one
could resist logic so fundamental.
Peter's heart sang with the solemn joy of a man who had found his work.
All through his youth he had felt blind yearnings and gropings for he
knew not what. It had driven him with endless travail out of Niggertown,
through school and college, and back to Niggertown,--this untiring Hound
of Heaven. But at last he had reached his work. He, Peter Siner, a
mulatto, with the blood of both white and black in his veins, would come
as an evangel of liberty to both white and black. The brown man's eyes
grew moist from Joy. His body seemed possessed of tremendous energy.
As he paced his room there came into the glory of Peter's thoughts the
memory of the Arkwright boy as he sat in the cedar glade brooding on the
fallen needles Peter recalled the hobbledehoy's disjointed words as he
wrestled with the moral and physical problems of adolescence. Peter
recalled his impulse to sit down by young Sam Arkwright, and, as best he
might, give him some clue to the critical and feverish period through
which he was passing.
He had not done so, but Peter remembered the instance down to the very
desperation in the face of the brooding youngster. And it seemed to
Peter that this rejected impulse had been a sign that he was destined to
be an evangel to the whites as well as to the blacks.
The joy of Peter's mission bore him aloft on vast wings. His room seemed
to fall away from him, and he was moving about his country, releasing
the two races from their bonds of suspicion and cruelty.
* * * * *
Slowly the old manor formed about Peter again, and he perceived that a
tapping on the door had summoned him back. He walked to the door with
his heart full of kindness for old Rose. She was bringing him his
supper. He felt as if he could take the old woman in his arms, and out
of the mere hugeness of his love sweeten her bitter life. The mulatto
opened the door as eagerly as if he were admitting some long-desired
friend; but when the shutter swung back, the old crone and her salver
were not there. All he could discern in the darkness were the white
pillars marking the night into panels. There was no light in the outer
kitchen. The whole manor was silent.
As he stood listening, the knocking was repeated, this time more
faintly. He fixed the sound at the window. He closed the door, walked
across the brilliant room, and opened the shutters.
For several moments he saw nothing more than the tall quadrangle of
blackness which the window framed; then a star or two pierced it; then
something moved. He saw a woman's figure standing close to the casement,
and out of the darkness Cissie Dildine's voice asked in its careful
English:
"Peter, may I come in?"