His recital somehow stirred him. He took her in his arms, pressed her cheek to his, and after a moment kissed her lips with the trembling ardor of a bridegroom.

Cissie remained passive a moment, then put up he hands, turned his face away, and slowly released herself.

Peter was taken aback.

"What is the matter, Cissie?"

"I can't go, Peter."

Peter looked at her with a feeling of strangeness.

"Can't go?"

The girl shook her head.

"You mean—you want us to live here?"

Cissie sat exceedingly still and barely shook her head.

The mulatto had a sensation as if the portals which disclosed a new and delicious life were slowly closing against him. He stared into her oval face.

"You don't mean, Cissie—you don't mean you don't want to marry me?"

The fagots on the hearth burned now with a cheerful flame. Cissie stared at it, breathing rapidly from the top of her lungs. She seemed about to faint. As Peter watched her the jealousy of the male crept over him.

"Look here, Cissie," he said in a queer voice, "you—you don't mean, after all, that Tump Pack is—"

"Oh no! No!" Her face showed her repulsion. Then she drew a long breath and apparently made up her mind to some sort of ordeal.

"Peter," she asked in a low tone, "did you ever think what we colored people are trying to reach?" She stared into his uncomprehending eyes. "I mean what is our aim, our goal, whom are we trying to be like?"

"We aren't trying to be like any one." Peter was entirely at a loss.

"Oh, yes, we are," Cissie hurried on. "Why do colored girls straighten their hair, bleach their skins, pinch their feet? Aren't they trying to look like white girls?"

Peter agreed, wondering at her excitement.

"And you went North to college, Peter, so you could think and act like a white man—"

Peter resisted this at once; he was copying nobody. The whole object of college was to develop one's personality, to bring out—

The girl stopped his objections almost piteously.

"Oh, don't argue! You know arguing throws me off. I—now I've forgotten how I meant to say it!" Tears of frustration welled up in her eyes.

Her mood was alarming, almost hysterical. Peter began comforting her.

"There, there, dear, dear Cissie, what is the matter? Don't say it at all." Then, inconsistently, he added: "You said I copied white men. Well, what of it?"

Cissie breathed her relief at having been given the thread of her discourse. She sat silent for a moment with the air of one screwing up her courage.

"It's this," she said in an uncertain voice: "sometimes we—we—girls— here in Niggertown copy the wrong thing first."

Peter looked blankly at her.

"The wrong thing first, Cissie?"

"Oh, yes; we—we begin on clothes and—and hair and—and that isn't the real matter."

"Why, no-o-o, that isn't the real matter," said Peter puzzled.

Cissie looked at his face and became hopeless.

"Oh, don't you understand! Lots of us—lots of us make that mistake! I—I did; so—so, Peter, I can't go with you!" She flung out the last phrase, and suddenly collapsed on the arm of her chair, sobbing.

Peter was amazed. He got up, sat on the arm of his own chair next to hers and put his arms about her, bending over her, mothering her. Her distress was so great that he said as earnestly as his ignorance permitted:

"Yes, Cissie, I understand now." But his tone belied his words, and the girl shook her head. "Yes, I do, Cissie," he repeated emptily. But she only shook her head as she leaned over him, and her tears slowly formed and trickled down on his hand. Then all at once old Caroline's accusation against Cissie flashed on Peter's mind. She had stolen that dinner in the turkey roaster, after all. It so startled him that he sat up straight. Cissie also sat up. She stopped crying, and sat looking into the fire.

"You mean—morals?" said Peter in a low tone.

Cissie barely nodded, her wet eyes fixed on the fire.

"I see. I was stupid."

The girl sat a moment, drawing deep breaths. At last she rose slowly.

"Well—I'm glad it's over. I'm glad you know." She stood looking at him almost composedly except for her breathing and her tear-stained face. "You see, Peter, if you had been like Tump Pack or Wince or any of the boys around here, it—it wouldn't have made much difference; but—but you went off and—and learned to think and feel like a white man. You— you changed your code, Peter." She gave a little shaken sound, something between a sob and a laugh. "I—I don't think th-that's very fair, Peter, to—to go away an'—an' change an' come back an' judge us with yo' n-new code." Cissie's precise English broke down.

Just then Peter's logic caught at a point.

"If you didn't know anything about my code, how do you know what I feel now?" he asked.

She looked at him with a queer expression.

"I found out when you kissed me under the arbor. It was too late then."

She stood erect, with dismissal very clearly written in her attitude. Peter walked out of the room.



CHAPTER VIII

With a certain feeling of clumsiness Peter groped in the dark hall for his hat, then, as quietly as he could, let himself out at the door. Outside he was surprised to find that daylight still lingered in the sky. He thought night had fallen. The sun lay behind the Big Hill, but its red rays pouring down through the boles of the cedars tinted long delicate avenues in the dusty atmosphere above his head. A sharp chill in the air presaged frost for the night. Somewhere in the crescent a boy yodeled for his dog at about half-minute intervals, with the persistence of children.

Peter walked a little distance, but finally came to a stand in the dust, looking at the negro cabins, not knowing where to go or what to do. Cissie's confession had destroyed all his plans. It had left him as adynamic as had his mother's death. It seemed to Peter that there was a certain similarity between the two events; both were sudden and desolating. And just as his mother had vanished utterly from his reach, so now it seemed Cissie was no more. Cissie the clear-eyed, Cissie the ambitious, Cissie the refined, had vanished away, and in her place stood a thief.

The thing was grotesque. Peter began a sudden shuddering in the cold. Then he began moving toward the empty cabin where he slept and kept his things. He moved along, talking to himself in the dusty emptiness of the crescent. He decided that he would go home, pack his clothes, and vanish. A St. Louis boat would be down that night, and he would just have time to pack his clothes and catch it. He would not take his books, his philosophies. He would let them remain, in the newspapered room, until all crumbled into uniform philosophic dust, and the teachings of Aristotle blew about Niggertown.

Then, as he thought of traveling North, the vision of the honeymoon he had just planned revived his numb brain into a dismal aching. He looked back through the dusk at the Dildine roof. It stood black against an opalescent sky. Out of the foreground, bending over it, arose a clump of tall sunflowers, in whose silhouette hung a suggestion of yellow and green. The whole scene quivered slightly at every throb of his heart. He thought what a fool he was to allow a picaresque past to keep him away from such a woman, how easy it would be to go back to the soft luxury of Cissie, to tell her it made no difference; and somehow, just at that moment it seemed not to.

Then the point of view which Peter had been four years acquiring swept away the impulse, and it left him moving toward his cabin again, empty, cold, and planless.

He was drawn out of his reverie by the soft voice of a little negro boy asking him apprehensively whom he was talking to.

Peter stopped, drew forth a handkerchief and dabbed the moisture from his cold face in the meticulous fashion of college men.

With the boy came a dog which was cautiously smelling Peter's shoes and trousers. Both boy and dog were investigating the phenomenon of Peter. Peter, in turn, looked down at them with a feeling that they had materialized out of nothing.

"What did you say?" he asked vaguely.

The boy was suddenly overcome with the excessive shyness of negro children, and barely managed to whisper:

"I—I ast wh-who you wuz a-talkin' to."

"Was I talking?"

The little negro nodded, undecided whether to stand his ground or flee. Peter touched the child's crisp hair.

"I was talking to myself," he said, and moved forward again.

The child instantly gained confidence at the slight caress, took a fold of Peter's trousers in his hand for friendliness, and the two trudged on together.

"Wh-whut you talkin' to yo' se'f for?"

Peter glanced down at the little black head that promised to think up a thousand questions.

"I was wondering where to go."

"Lawsy! is you los' yo' way?"

He stroked the little head with a rush of self-pity.

"Yes, I have, son; I've completely lost my way."

The child twisted his head around and peered up alongside Peter's arm. Presently he asked:

"Ain't you Mr. Peter Siner?"

"Yes."

"Ain't you de man whut's gwine to ma'y Miss Cissie Dildine?"

Peter looked down at his small companion with a certain concern that his marriage was already gossip known to babes.

"I'm Peter Siner," he repeated.

"Den I knows which way you wants to go," piped the youngster in sudden helpfulness. "You wants to go over to Cap'n Renfrew's place acrost de Big Hill. He done sont fuh you. Mr. Wince Washington tol' me, ef I seed you, to tell you dat Cap'n Renfrew wants to see you. I dunno whut hit's about. I ast Wince, an' he didn' know."

Peter recalled the message Nan Berry had given him some hours before. Now the same summons had seeped around to him from another direction.

"I—I'll show you de way to Cap'n Renfrew's ef—ef you'll come back wid me th'ugh de cedar glade," proposed the child. "I—I ain't skeered in de cedar glade, b-b-but hit's so dark I kain't see my way back home. I—I—"

Peter thanked him and declined his services. After all, he might as well go to see Captain Renfrew. He owed the old gentleman some thanks—and ten dollars.

The only thing of which Peter Siner was aware during his walk over the Big Hill and through the village was his last scene with Cissie. He went over it again and again, repeating their conversation, inventing new replies, framing new action, questioning more fully into the octoroon's vague confession and his benumbed acceptance of it. The moment his mind completed the little drama it started again from the very beginning.

At Captain Renfrew's gate this mental mummery paused long enough for him to vacillate between walking in or going around and shouting from the back gate. It is a point of etiquette in Hooker's Bend that negroes shall enter a white house from the back stoop. Peter had no desire to transgress this custom. On the other hand, if Captain Renfrew was receiving him as a fellow of Harvard, the back door, in its way, would prove equally embarrassing.

After a certain indecision he compromised by entering the front gate and calling the Captain's name from among the scattered bricks of the old walk.

The house lay silent, half smothered in a dark tangle of shrubbery. Peter called twice before he heard the shuffle of house slippers, and then saw the Captain's dressing-gown at the piazza steps.

"Is that you, Peter?" came a querulous voice.

"Yes, Captain. I was told you wanted to see me."

"You've been deliberate in coming," criticized the old gentleman, testily. "I sent you word by some black rascal three days ago."

"I just received the message to-day." Peter remained discreetly at the gate.

"Yes; well, come in, come in. See if you can do anything with this damnable lamp."

The old man turned with a dignified drawing-together of his dressing- gown and moved back. Apparently, the renovation of a cranky lamp was the whole content of the Captain's summons to Peter.

There was something so characteristic in this incident that Peter was moved to a vague sense of mirth. It was just like the old regime to call in a negro, a special negro, from ten miles away to move a jar of ferns across the lawn or trim a box hedge or fix a lamp.

Peter followed the old gentleman around to the back piazza facing his study. There, laid out on the floor, were all the parts of a gasolene lamp, together with a pipe-wrench, a hammer, a little old-fashioned vise, a bar of iron, and an envelop containing the mantels and the more delicate parts of the lamp.

"It's extraordinary to me," criticized the Captain, "why they can't make a gasolene lamp that will go, and remain in a going condition."

"Has it been out of fix for three days?" asked Peter, sorry that the old gentleman should have lacked a light for so long.

"No," growled the Captain; "it started gasping at four o'clock last night; so I put it out and went to bed. I've been working at it this evening. There's a little hole in the tip,—if I could see it,—a hair- sized hole, painfully small. Why any man wants to make gasolene lamps with microscopic holes that ordinary intelligence must inform him will become clogged I cannot conceive."

Peter ventured no opinion on this trait of lampmakers, but said that if the Captain knew where he could get an oil hand-lamp for a little more light, he thought he could unstop the hole.

The Captain looked at his helper and shook his head.

"I am surprised at you, Peter. When I was your age, I could see an aperture like that hole under the last quarter of the moon. In this strong light I could have—er—lunged the cleaner through it, sir. You must have strained your eyes in college." He paused, then added: "You'll find hand-lamps in any of the rooms fronting this porch. I don't know whether they have oil in them or not—the shiftless niggers that come around to take care of this building—no dependence to be put in them. When I try it myself, I do even worse."

The old gentleman's tone showed that he was thawing out of his irritable mood, and Peter sensed that he meant to be amusing in an austere, unsmiling fashion. The Captain rubbed his delicate wrinkled hands together in a pleased fashion and sat down in a big porch chair to await Peter's assembling of the lamp. The brown man started down the long piazza, in search of a hand-light.

He found a lamp in the first room he entered, returned to the piazza, sat down on the edge of it, and began his tinkering. The old Captain apparently watched him with profound satisfaction. Presently, after the fashion of the senile, he began endless and minute instructions as to how the lamp should be cleaned.

"Take the wire in your left hand, Peter,—that's right,—now hold the tip a little closer to the light—no, place the mantels on the right side—that's the way I do it. System...." the old man's monologue ran on and on, and became a murmur in Peter's ears. It was rather soothing than otherwise. Now and then it held tremulous vibrations that might have been from age or that might have been from some deep satisfaction mounting even to joy. But to Peter that seemed hardly probable. No doubt it was senility. The Captain was a tottery old man, past the age for any fundamental joy.

Night had fallen now, and a darkness, musky with autumn weeds, hemmed in the sphere of yellow light on the old piazza. A black-and-white cat materialized out of the gloom, purring, and arching against a pillar. The whole place was filled with a sense of endless leisure. The old man, the cat, the perfume of the weeds, soothed in Peter even the rawness of his hurt at Cissie.

Indeed, in a way, the old manor became a sort of apology for the octoroon girl. The height and the reach of the piazza, exaggerated by the darkness, suggested a time when retinues of negroes passed through its dignified colonnades. Those black folk were a part of the place. They came and went, picked up and used what they could, and that was all life held for them. They were without wage, without rights, even to the possession of their own bodies; so by necessity they took what they could. That was only fifty-odd years ago. Thus, in a way, Peter's surroundings began a subtle explanation of and apology for Cissie, the whole racial training of black folk in petty thievery. And that this should have touched Cissie—the meanness, the pathos of her fate moved Peter.

The negro was aroused from his reverie by the old Captain's getting out of his chair and saying, "Very good," and then Peter saw that he had finished the lamp. The two men rose and carried it into the study, where Peter pumped and lighted it; a bit later its brilliant white light flooded the room.

"Quite good." The old Captain stood rubbing his hands with his odd air of continued delight. "How do you like this place, anyway, Peter?" He wrapped his gown around him, sat down in the old Morris chair beside the book-piled table, and indicated another seat for Peter.

The mulatto took it, aware of a certain flexing of Hooker's Bend custom, where negroes, unless old or infirm, are not supposed to sit in the presence of whites.

"Do you mean the study, Captain?"

"Yes, the study, the whole place."

"It's very pleasant," replied Peter; "it has the atmosphere of age."

Captain Renfrew nodded.

"These old places," pursued Peter, "always give me an impression of statesmanship, somehow. I always think of grave old gentlemen busy with the cares of public policy."

The old man seemed gratified.

"You are sensitive to atmosphere. If I may say it, every Southron of the old regime was a statesman by nature and training. The complete care of two or three hundred negroes, a regard for their bodily, moral, and spiritual welfare, inevitably led the master into the impersonal attitude of statecraft. It was a training, sir, in leadership, in social thinking, in, if you please, altruism." The old gentleman thumped the arm of his chair with a translucent palm. "Yes, sir, negro slavery was God's great lesson to the South in altruism and loving-kindness, sir! My boy, I do believe with all my heart that the institution of slavery was placed here in God's country to rear up giants of political leadership, that our nation might weather the revolutions of the world. Oh, the Yankees are necessary! I know that!" The old Captain held up a palm at Peter as if repressing an imminent retort. "I know the Yankees are the Marthas of the nation. They furnish food and fuel to the ship of state, but, my boy, the reservoir of our country's spiritual and mental strength, the Mary of our nation, must always be the South. Virginia is the mother of Presidents!"

The Captain's oration left him rather breathless. He paused a moment, then asked:

"Peter, have you ever thought that we men of the leisure class owe a debt to the world?"

Peter smiled.

"I know the theory of the leisure class, but I've had very little practical experience with leisure."

"Well, that's a subject close to my heart. As a scholar and a thinker, I feel that I should give the fruits of my leisure to the world. Er—in fact, Peter, that is why I sent for you to come and see me."

"Why you sent for me?" Peter was surprised at this turn.

"Precisely. You."

Here the old gentleman got himself out of his chair, walked across to one of a series of drawers in his bookcases, opened it, and took out a sheaf of papers and a quart bottle. He brought the papers and the bottle back to the table, made room for them, put the papers in a neat pile, and set the bottle at a certain distance from the heap.

"Now, Peter, please hand me one of those wineglasses in the religious section of my library—I always keep two or three glasses among my religious works, in memory of the fact that our Lord and Master wrought a miracle at the feast of Cana, especially to bless the cup. Indeed, Peter, thinking of that miracle at the wedding-feast, I wonder, sir, how the prohibitionists can defend their conduct even to their own consciences, because logically, sir, logically, the miracle of our gracious Lord completely cuts away the ground from beneath their feet!

"No wonder, when the Mikado sent a Japanese envoy to America to make a tentative examination of Christianity as a proper creed for the state religion of Japan—no wonder, with this miracle flouted by the prohibitionists, the embassy carried back the report that Americans really have no faith in the religion they profess. Shameful! Shameful! Place the glass there on the left of the bottle. A little farther away from the bottle, please, just a trifle more. Thank you."

The Captain poured himself a tiny glassful, and its bouquet immediately filled the room. There was no guessing how old that whisky was.

"I will not break the laws of my country, Peter, no matter how godless and sacrilegious those laws may be; therefore I cannot offer you a drink, but you will observe a second glass among the religious works, and the bottle sits in plain view on the table—er—em." He watched Peter avail himself of his opportunity, and then added, "Now, you may just drink to me, standing, as you are, like that."

They drank, Peter standing, the old gentleman seated.

"It is just as necessary," pursued the old connoisseur, when Peter was reseated, "it is just as necessary for a gentleman to have a delicate palate for the tints of the vine as it is for him to have a delicate eye for the tints of the palette. Nature bestowed a taste both in art and wine on man, which he should strive to improve at every opportunity. It is a gift from God. Perhaps you would like another glass. No? Then accommodate me."

He drained this one, with Peter standing, worked his withered lips back and forth to experience its full taste, then swallowed, and smacked.

"Now, Peter," he said, "the reason I asked you to come to see me is that I need a man about this house. That will be one phase of your work. The more important part is that you shall serve as a sort of secretary. I have here a manuscript." He patted the pile of papers. "My handwriting is rather difficult. I want you to copy this matter out and get it ready for the printer."

Peter became more and more astonished.

"Are you offering me a permanent place, Captain Renfrew?" he asked.

The old man nodded.

"I need a man with a certain liberality of culture. I will no doubt have you run through books and periodicals and make note of any points germane to my thesis."

Peter looked at the pile of script on the table.

"That is very flattering, Captain; but the fact is, I came by your place at this hour because I am just in the act of leaving here on the steamboat to-night."

The Captain looked at Peter with concern on his face. "Leaving Hooker's Bend?"

"Yes, sir."

"Why?"

Peter hesitated.

"Well, my mother is dead—"

"Yes, but your—your—your work is still here, Peter." The Captain fell into a certain confusion. "A man's work, Peter; a man's work."

"Do you mean my school-teaching?"

Then came a pause. The conversation somehow had managed to leave them both somewhat at sea. The Captain began again, in a different tone:

"Peter, I wish you to remain here with me for another reason. I am an old man, Peter. Anything could happen to me here in this big house, and nobody would know it. I don't like to think of it." The old man's tone quite painted his fears. "I am not afraid of death, Peter. I have walked before God all my life save in one or two points, which, I believe, in His mercy, He has forgiven me; but I cannot endure the idea of being found here some day in some unconsidered posture, fallen out of a chair, or a-sprawl on the floor. I wish to die with dignity, Peter, as I have lived."

"Then you mean that you want me to stay here with you until—until the end, Captain?"

The old man nodded.

"That is my desire, Peter, for an honorarium which you yourself shall designate. At my death, you will receive some proper portion of my estate; in fact, the bulk of my estate, because I leave no other heirs. I am the last Renfrew of my race, Peter."

Peter grew more and more amazed as the old gentleman unfolded this strange proposal. What queerer, pleasanter berth could he find than that offered him here in the quietude of the old manor, among books, tending the feeble flame of this old aristocrat's life? An air of scholasticism hung about the library. In some corner of this dark oaken library his philosophies would rest comfortably.

Then it occurred to Peter that he would have to continue his sleeping and eating in Niggertown, and since his mother had died and his rupture with Cissie, the squalor and smells of the crescent had become impossible. He told the old Captain his objections as diplomatically as possible. The old man made short work of them. He wanted Peter to sleep in the manor within calling distance, and he might begin this very night and stay on for a week or so as a sort of test whether he liked the position or not. The Captain waited with some concern until Peter agreed to a trial.

After that the old gentleman talked on interminably of the South, of the suffrage movement, the destructive influence it would have on the home, the Irish question, the Indian question, whether the mound-builders did not spring from the two lost tribes of Israel—an endless outpouring of curious facts, quaint reasoning, and extraordinary conclusions, all delivered with the great dignity and in the flowing periods of an orator.

It was fully two o'clock in the morning when it occurred to the Captain that his new secretary might like to go to bed. The old man took the hand-lamp which was still burning and led the way out to the back piazza past a number of doors to a corner bedroom. He shuffled along in his carpet slippers, followed by the black-and-white cat, which ran along, making futile efforts to rub itself against his lean shanks. Peter followed in a sort of stupor from the flood of words, ideas, and strange fancies that had been poured into his ears.

The Captain turned off the piazza into one of those old-fashioned Southern rooms with full-length windows, which were really glazed doors, a ceiling so high that Peter could make out only vague concentric rings of stucco-work among the shadows overhead, and a floor space of ball- room proportions. In one corner was a huge canopy bed, across from it a clothes-press of dark wood, and in another corner a large screen hiding the bathing arrangements.

Peter's bedroom was a sleeping apartment, in the old sense of the word before the term "apartment" had lost its dignity.

The Captain placed the lamp on the great table and indicated Peter's possession with a wave of the hand.

"If you stay here, Peter, I will put in a call-bell, so I can awaken you if I need you during the night. Now I wish you healthful slumbers and pleasant dreams." With that the old gentleman withdrew ceremoniously.

When the Captain was gone, the mulatto remained standing in the vast expanse, marveling over this queer turn of fortune. Why Captain Renfrew had selected him as a secretary and companion Peter could not fancy.

The magnificence of his surroundings revived his late dream of a honeymoon with Cissie. Certainly, in his fancy, he had visioned a honeymoon in Pullman parlor cars and suburban bungalows. He had been mistaken. This great chamber rose about him like a corrected proof of his desire.

Into just such a room he would like to lead Cissie; into this great room that breathed pride and dignity. What a glowing heart the girl would have made for its somber magnificence!

He walked over to the full-length windows and opened them; then he unbolted the jalousies outside and swung them back. The musk of autumn weeds breathed in out of the darkness. Peter drew a long breath, with a sort of wistful melting in his chest.



CHAPTER IX

A turmoil aroused Peter Siner the next morning, and when he discovered where he was, in the big canopy bed in the great room, he listened curiously and heard a continuous chattering and quarreling. After a minute or two he recognized the voice of old Rose Hobbett. Rose was cooking the Captain's breakfast, and she performed this function in a kind of solitary rage. She banged the vessels, slammed the stove-eyes on and off, flung the stove-wood about, and kept up a snarling animadversion upon every topic that drifted through her kinky head. She called the kitchen a rat-hole, stated the Captain must be as mean as the devil to live as long as he did, complained that no one ever paid any attention to her, that she might as well be a stray cat, and so on.

As Peter grew wider awake, the monotony of the old negress's rancor faded into an unobserved noise. He sat up on the edge of his bed between the parted curtains and divined there was a bath behind the screen in the corner of his room. Sure enough, he found two frayed but clean towels, a pan, a pitcher, and a small tub all made of tin. Peter assembled his find and began splashing his heavily molded chest with a feeling of well-being. As he splashed on the water, he amused himself by listening again to old Rose. She was now complaining that some white young'uns had called her "raving Rose." She hoped "God'lmighty would send down two she bears and eat 'em up." Peter was amazed by the old crone's ability to maintain an unending flow of concentrated and aimless virulence.

The kitchen of the Renfrew manor was a separate building, and presently Peter saw old Rose carrying great platters across the weed-grown compound into the dining-room. She bore plate after plate piled high with cookery,—enough for a company of men. A little later came a clangor on a rusty triangle, as if she were summoning a house party. Old Rose did things in a wholesale spirit.

Peter started for his door, but when he had opened the shutter, he stood hesitating. Breakfast introduced another delicate problem. He decided not to go to the dining-room at once, but to wait and allow Captain Renfrew to indicate whether he, Peter, should break his fast with the master in the dining-room or with old Rose in the kitchen.

A moment later he saw the Captain coming down the long back piazza. Peter almost addressed his host, but the old Southerner proceeded into the dining-room apparently without seeing Peter at all.

The guest was gathering his breath to call good morning, but took the cue with a negro's sensitiveness, and let his eyes run along the weeds in the compound. The drying stalks were woven with endless spider-webs, all white with frost. Peter stood regarding their delicate geometries a moment longer and then reentered his room, not knowing precisely what to do. He could hear Rose walking across the piazza to and from the dining- room, and the clink of tableware. A few minutes later a knock came at his door, and the old woman entered with a huge salver covered with steaming dishes.

The negress came into the room scowling, and seemed doubtful for a moment just how to shut the door and still hold the tray with both hands. She solved the problem by backing against the door tremendously. Then she saw Peter. She straightened and stared at him with outraged dignity.

"Well, 'fo' Gawd! Is I bringin' dish-here breakfus' to a nigger?"

"I suppose it's mine," agreed Peter, amused.

"But whuffo, whuffo, nigger, is it dat you ain't come to de kitchen an' eat off'n de shelf? Is you sick?"

Peter admitted fair bodily vigor.

"Den whut de debbil is I got into!" cried Rose, angrily. "I ain't gwine wuck at no sich place, ca'yin' breakfus' to a big beef uv a nigger, stout as a mule. Say, nigger, wha-chu doin' in heah, anyway? Hoccum dis?"

Peter tried to explain that he was there to do a little writing for the Captain.

"Well, 'fo' Gawd, when niggers gits to writin' fuh white folks, ants'll be jumpin' fuh bullfrogs—an havin' other niggers bring dey breakfusses. You jes as much a nigger as I is, Peter Siner, de brightes' day you ever seen!"

Peter began a conciliatory phrase.

Old Rose banged the platter on the table and then threatened:

"Dis is de las' time I fetches a moufful to you, Peter Siner, or any other nigger. You ain't no black Jesus, even ef you is a woods calf."

Peter paused in drawing a chair to the table.

"What did you say, Rose?" he asked sharply.

"You heared whut I say."

A wave of anger went over Peter.

"Yes, I did. You ought to be ashamed to speak ill of the dead."

The crone tossed her malicious head, a little abashed, perhaps, yet very glad she had succeeded in hurting Peter. She turned and went out the door, mumbling something which might have been apology or renewed invectives.

Peter watched the old virago close the door and then sat down to his breakfast. His anger presently died away, and he sat wondering what could have happened to Rose Hobbett that had corroded her whole existence. Did she enjoy her vituperation, her continual malice? He tried to imagine how she felt.

The breakfast Rose had brought him was delicious: hot biscuits of feathery lightness, three wide slices of ham, a bowl of scrambled eggs, a pot of coffee, some preserved raspberries, and a tiny glass of whisky.

The plate which Captain Renfrew had set before his guest was a delicate dawn pink ringed with a wreath of holly. It was old Worcester porcelain of about the decade of 1760. The coffee-pot was really an old Whieldon teapot in broad cauliflower design. Age and careless heating had given the surface a fine reticulation. His cup and saucer, on the contrary, were thick pieces of ware such as the cabin-boys toss about on steamboats. The whole ceramic melange told of the fortuities of English colonial and early American life, of the migration of families westward. No doubt, once upon a time, that dawn-pink Worcester had married into a Whieldon cauliflower family. A queer sort of genealogy might be traced among Southern families through their mixtures of tableware.

As Peter mused over these implications of long ancestral lines, it reminded him that he had none. Over his own past, over the lineage of nearly every negro in the South, hung a curtain. Even the names of the colored folk meant nothing, and gave no hint of their kin and clan. At the end of the war between the States, Peter's people had selected names for themselves, casually, as children pick up a pretty stone. They meant nothing. It occurred to Peter for the first time, as he sat looking at the chinaware, that he knew nothing about himself; whether his kinsmen were valiant or recreant he did not know. Even his own father he knew little about except that his mother had said his name was Peter, like his own, and that he had gone down the river on a tie boat and was drowned.

A faint sound attracted Peter's attention. He looked out at his open window and saw old Rose making off the back way with something concealed under her petticoat. Peter knew it was the unused ham and biscuits that she had cooked. For once the old negress hurried along without railing at the world. She moved with a silent, but, in a way, self-respecting, flight. Peter could see by the tilt of her head and the set of her shoulders that not only did her spoil gratify her enmity to mankind in general and the Captain in particular, but she was well within her rights in her acquisition. She disappeared around a syringa bush, and was heard no more until she reappeared to cook the noon meal, as vitriolic as ever.

* * * * *

When Peter entered the library, old Captain Renfrew greeted him with morning wishes, thus sustaining the fiction that they had not seen each other before, that morning.

The old gentleman seemed pleased but somewhat excited over his new secretary. He moved some of his books aimlessly from one table to another, placed them in exact piles as if he were just about to plunge into heroic labor, and could not give time to such details once he had begun.

As he arranged his books just so, he cleared his throat.

"Now, Peter, we want to get down to this," he announced dynamically; "do this thing, shove this work out!" He started with tottery briskness around to his manuscript drawer, but veered off to the left to aline some magazines. "System, Peter, system. Without system one may well be hopeless of performing any great literary labor; but with system, the constant piling up of brick on brick, stone on stone—it's the way Rome was built, my boy."

Peter made a murmur supposed to acknowledge the correctness of this view.

Eventually the old Captain drew out his drawer of manuscript, stood fumbling with it uncertainly. Now and then he glanced at Peter, a genuine secretary who stood ready to help him in his undertaking. The old gentleman picked up some sheets of his manuscript, seemed about to read them aloud, but after a moment shook his head, and said, "No, we'll do that to-night," and restored them to their places. Finally he turned to his helper.

"Now, Peter," he explained, "in doing this work, I always write at night. It's quieter then,—less distraction. My mornings I spend downtown in conversation with my friends. If you should need me, Peter, you can walk down and find me in front of the livery-stable. I sit there for a while each morning."

The gravity with which he gave this schedule of his personal habits amused Peter, who bowed with a serious, "Very well, Captain."

"And in the meantime," pursued the old man, looking vaguely about the room, "you will do well to familiarize yourself with my library in order that you may be properly qualified for your secretarial labors."

Peter agreed again.

"And now if you will get my hat and coat, I will be off and let you go to work," concluded the Captain, with an air of continued urgency.

Peter became thoroughly amused at such an outcome of the old gentleman's headlong attack on his work,—a stroll down to the village to hold conversation with friends. The mulatto walked unsmilingly to a little closet where the Captain hung his things. He took down the old gentleman's tall hat, a gray greatcoat worn shiny about the shoulders and tail, and a finely carved walnut cane. Some reminiscence of the manners of butlers which Peter had seen in theaters caused him to swing the overcoat across his left arm and polish the thin nap of the old hat with his right sleeve. He presented it to his employer with a certain duplication of a butler's obsequiousness. He offered the overcoat to the old gentleman's arms with the same air. Then he held up the collar of the greatcoat with one hand and with the other reached under its skirts, and drew down the Captain's long day coat with little jerks, as if he were going through a ritual.

Peter grew more and more hilarious over his barber's manners. It was his contribution to the old gentleman's literary labors, and he was doing it beautifully, so he thought. He was just making some minute adjustments of the collar when, to his amazement, Captain Renfrew turned on him.

"Damn it, sir!" he flared out. "What do you think you are? I didn't engage you for a kowtowing valet in waiting, sir! I asked you, sir, to come under my roof as an intellectual co-worker, as one gentleman asks another, and here you are making these niggery motions! They are disgusting! They are defiling! They are beneath the dignity of one gentleman to another, sir! What makes it more degrading, I perceive by your mannerism that you assume a specious servility, sir, as if you would flatter me by it!"

The old lawyer's face was white. His angry old eyes jerked Peter out of his slight mummery. The negro felt oddly like a grammar-school boy caught making faces behind his master's back. It shocked him into sincerer manners.

"Captain," he said with a certain stiffness, "I apologize for my mistake; but may I ask how you desire me to act?"

"Simply, naturally, sir," thundered the Captain, "as one alumnus of Harvard to another! It is quite proper for a young man, sir, to assist an old gentleman with his hat and coat, but without fripperies and genuflections and absurdities!"

The old man's hauteur touched some spring of resentment in Peter. He shook his head.

"No, Captain; our lack of sympathy goes deeper than manners. My position here is anomalous. For instance, I can talk to you sitting, I can drink with you standing, but I can't breakfast with you at all. I do that in camera, like a disgraceful divorce proceeding. It's precisely as I was treated coming down here South again; it's as I've been treated ever since I've been back; it's—" He paused abruptly and swallowed down the rancor that filled him. "No," he repeated in a different tone, "there is no earthly excuse for me to remain here, Captain, or to let you go on measuring out your indulgences to me. There is no way for us to get together or to work together—not this far South. Let me thank you for a night's entertainment and go."

Peter turned about, meaning to make an end of this queer adventure.

The old Captain watched him, and his pallor increased. He lifted an unsteady hand.

"No, no, Peter," he objected, "not so soon. This has been no trial, no fair trial. The little—little—er—details of our domestic life here, they will—er—arrange themselves, Peter. Gossip—talk, you know, we must avoid that." The old lawyer stood staring with strange eyes at his protege. "I—I'm interested in you, Peter. My actions may seem—odd, but—er—a negro boy going off and doing what you have done— extraordinary. I—I have spoken to your mother, Caroline, about you often. In fact, Peter, I—I made some little advances in order that you might complete your studies. Now, now, don't thank me! It was purely impersonal. You seemed bright. I have often thought we gentle people of the South ought to do more to encourage our black folk—not—not as social equals—" Here the old gentleman made a wry mouth as if he had tasted salt.

"Stay here and look over the library," he broke off abruptly. "We can arrange some ground of—of common action, some—"

He settled the lapels of his great-coat with precision, addressed his palm to the knob of his stick, and marched stiffly out of the library, around the piazza, and along the dismantled walk to the front gate.

Peter stood utterly astonished at this strange information. Suddenly he ran after the old lawyer, and rounded the turn of the piazza in time to see him walk stiffly down the shaded street with tremulous dignity. The old gentleman was much the same as usual, a little shakier, perhaps, his tall hat a little more polished, his shiny gray overcoat set a little more snugly at the collar.



CHAPTER X

The village of Hooker's Bend amuses itself mainly with questionable jests that range all the way from the slightly brackish to the hopelessly obscene. Now, in using this type of anecdote, the Hooker's- Benders must not be thought to design an attack upon the decencies of life; on the contrary, they are relying on the fact that their hearers have, in the depths of their beings, a profound reverence for the object of their sallies. And so, by taking advantage of the moral shock they produce and linking it to the idea of an absurdity, they convert the whole psychical reaction into an explosion of humor. Thus the ring of raconteurs telling blackguardly stories around the stoves in Hooker's Bend stores, are, in reality, exercising one another in the more delicate sentiments of life, and may very well be classed as a round table of Sir Galahads, sans peur et sans reproche.

However, the best men weary in well doing, and for the last few days Hooker's Bend had switched from its intellectual staple of conversation to consider the comedy of Tump Pack's undoing. The incident held undeniably comic elements. For Tump to start out carrying a forty-four, meaning to blow a rival out of his path, and to wind up hard at work, picking cotton at nothing a day for a man whose offer of three dollars a day he had just refused, certainly held the makings of a farce.

On the heels of this came the news that Peter Siner meant to take advantage of Tump's arrest and marry Cissie Dildine. Old Parson Ranson was responsible for the spread of this last rumor. He had fumbled badly in his effort to hold Peter's secret. Not once, but many times, always guarded by a pledge of secrecy, had he revealed the approaching wedding. When pressed for a date, the old negro said he was "not at lib'ty to tell."

Up to this point white criticism viewed the stage-setting of the black comedy with the impersonal interest of a box party. Some of the round table said they believed there would be a dead coon or so before the scrape was over.

Dawson Bobbs, the ponderous constable, went to the trouble to telephone Mr. Cicero Throgmartin, for whom Tump was working, cautioning Throgmartin to make sure that Tump Pack was in the sleeping-shack every night, as he might get wind of the wedding and take a notion to bolt and stop it. "You know, you can't tell what a fool nigger'll do," finished Bobbs.

Throgmartin was mildly amused, promised the necessary precautions, and said:

"It looks like Peter has put one over on Tump, and maybe a college education does help a nigger some, after all."

The constable thought it was just luck.

"Well, I dunno," said Throgmartin, who was a philosopher, and inclined to view every matter from various angles. "Peter may of worked this out somehow."

"Have you heard what Henry Hooker done to Siner in the land deal?"

Throgmartin said he had.

"No, I don't mean that. I mean Henry's last wrinkle in garnisheeing old Ca'line's estate in his bank for the rest of the purchase money on the Dilihay place."

There was a pause.

"You don't mean it!"

"Damn 'f I don't."

The constable's sentence shook with suppressed mirth, and the next moment roars of laughter came over the telephone wire.

"Say, ain't he the bird!"

"He's the original early bird. I'd like to get a snap-shot of the worm that gets away from him."

Both men laughed heartily again.

"But, say," objected Throgmartin, who was something of a lawyer himself,—as, indeed, all Southern men are,—"I thought the Sons and Daughters of Benevolence owed Hooker, not Peter Siner, nor Ca'line's estate."

"Well, it is the Sons and Daughters, but Ca'line was one of 'em, and they ain't no limited li'bility 'sociation. Henry can jump on anything any of 'em's got. Henry got the Persimmon to bring him a copy of their by-laws."

"Well, I swear! Say, if Henry wasn't kind of held back by his religion, he'd use a gun, wouldn't he?"

"I dunno. I can say this for Henry's religion: 'It's jest like Henry's wife,—it's the dearest thing to his heart; he'd give his life for it, but it don't do nobody a damn bit of good except jest Henry.'"

The constable's little eyes twinkled as he heard Throgmartin roaring with laughter and sputtering appreciative oaths.

At that moment a ringing of the bell jarred the ears of both telephonists. A voice asked for Dr. Jallup. It was an ill time to interrupt two gentlemen. The flair of a jest is lost in a pause. The officer stated sharply that he was the constable of Wayne County and was talking business about the county's prisoners. His tone was so charged with consequence that the voice that wanted a doctor apologized hastily and ceased.

Came a pause in which neither man found anything to say. Laughter is like that,—a gay bubble that a touch will destroy. Presently Bobbs continued, gravely enough:

"Talking about Siner, he's stayin' up at old man Renfrew's now."

"'At so?"

"Old Rose Hobbett swears he's doin' some sort of writin' up there and livin' in one of the old man's best rooms."

"Hell he is!"

"Yeah?" the constable's voice questioned Throgmartin's opinion about such heresy and expressed his own.

"D' recken it's so? Old Rose is such a thief and a liar."

"Nope," declared the constable, "the old nigger never would of made up a lie like that,—never would of thought of it. Old Cap'n Renfrew's gettin' childish; this nigger's takin' advantage of it. Down at the liver'-stable the boys were talkin' about Siner goin' to git married, an' dern if old man Renfrew didn't git cut up about it!"

"Well," opined Throgmartin, charitably, "the old man livin' there all by himself—I reckon even a nigger is some comp'ny. They're funny damn things, niggers is; never know a care nor trouble. Lord! I wish I was as care-free as they are!"

"Don't you, though!" agreed the constable, with the weight of the white man's burden on his shoulders. For this is a part of the Southern credo,—that all negroes are gay, care-free, and happy, and that if one could only be like the negroes, gay, care-free, and happy—Ah, if one could only be like the negroes!

None of this gossip reached Peter directly, but a sort of back-wash did catch him keenly through young Sam Arkwright and serve as a conundrum for several days.

One morning Peter was bringing an armful of groceries up the street to the old manor, and he met the boy coming in the opposite direction. The negro's mind was centered on a peculiar problem he had found in the Renfrew library, so, according to a habit he had acquired in Boston, he took the right-hand side of the pavement, which chanced to be the inner side. This violated a Hooker's-Bend convention, which decrees that when a white and a black meet on the sidewalk, the black man invariably shall take the outer side.

For this faux pas the gangling youth stopped Peter, fell to abusing and cursing him for his impudence, his egotism, his attempt at social equality,—all of which charges, no doubt, were echoes from the round table. Such wrath over such an offense was unusual. Ordinarily, a white villager would have thought several uncomplimentary things about Peter, but would have said nothing.

Peter stopped with a shock of surprise, then listened to the whole diatribe with a rising sense of irritation and irony. Finally, without a word, he corrected his mistake by retracing his steps and passing Sam again, this time on the outside.

Peter walked on up the street, outwardly calm, but his ears burned, and the queer indignity stuck in his mind. As he went along he invented all sorts of ironical remarks he might have made to Arkwright, which would have been unwise; then he thought of sober reasoning he could have used, which would perhaps have been just as ill-advised. Still later he wondered why Arkwright had fallen into such a rage over such a trifle. Peter felt sure there was some contributing rancor in the youth's mind. Perhaps he had received a scolding at home or a whipping at school, or perhaps he was in the midst of one of those queer attacks of megalomania from which adolescents are chronic sufferers. Peter fancied this and that, but he never came within hail of the actual reason.

When the brown man reached the old manor, the quietude of the library, with its blackened mahogany table, its faded green Axminster, the meridional globe with its dusty twinkle, banished the incident from his mind. He returned to his work of card-indexing the Captain's books. He took half a dozen at a time from the shelves, dusted them on the piazza, then carried them to the embrasure of the window, which offered a pleasant light for reading and for writing the cards.

He went through volume after volume,—speeches by Clay, Calhoun, Yancy, Prentiss, Breckenridge; an old life of General Taylor, Foxe's "Book of Martyrs"; a collection of the old middle-English dramatists, such as Lillo, Garrick, Arthur Murphy, Charles Macklin, George Colman, Charles Coffey, men whose plays have long since declined from the boards and disappeared from the reading-table.

The Captain's collection of books was strongly colored by a religious cast,—John Wesley's sermons, Charles Wesley's hymns; a treatise presenting a biblical proof that negroes have no souls; a little book called "Flowers Gathered," which purported to be a compilation of the sayings of ultra-pious children, all of whom died young; an old book called "Elements of Criticism," by Henry Home of Kames; another tome entitled "Studies of Nature," by St. Pierre. This last was a long argument for the miraculous creation of the world as set forth in Genesis. The proof offered was a resume of the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms, showing their perfect fitness for man's use, and the immediate induction was that they were designed for man's use. Still another work calculated the exact age of the earth by the naive method of counting the generations from Adam to Christ, to the total adding eighteen hundred and eighty-five years (for the book was written in 1885), and the original six days it required the Lord to build the earth. By referring to Genesis and finding out precisely what the Creator did on the morning of the first day, the writer contrived to bring his calculation of the age of the earth and everything in the world to a precision of six hours, give or take,—a somewhat closer schedule than that made by the Tennessee river boats coming up from St. Louis.

These and similar volumes formed the scientific section of Captain Renfrew's library, and it was this paucity of the natural sciences that formed the problem which Peter tried to solve. All scientific additions came to an abrupt stop about the decade of 1880-90. That was the date when Charles Darwin's great fructifying theory, enunciated in 1859, began to seep into the South.

In the Captain's library the only notice of evolution was a book called "Darwinism Dethroned." As for the elaborations of the Darwinian hypothesis by Spencer, Fiske, DeVries, Weismann, Haeckel, Kidd, Bergson, and every subsequent philosophic or biologic writer, all these men might never have written a line so far as Captain Renfrew's library was informed.

Now, why such extraordinary occlusions? Why should Captain Renfrew deny himself the very commonplaces of thought, theories familiarly held by the rest of America, and, indeed, by all the rest of the civilized world?

Musing by the window, Peter succeeded in stating his problem more broadly: Why was Captain Renfrew an intellectual reactionist? The old gentleman was the reverse of stupid. Why should he confine his selection of books to a few old oddities that had lost their battle against a theory which had captured the intellectual world fifty years before?

Nor was it Captain Renfrew alone. Now and then Peter saw editorials appearing in leading Southern journals, seriously attacking the evolutionary hypothesis. Ministers in respectable churches still fulminated against it. Peter knew that the whole South still clings, in a way, to the miraculous and special creation of the earth as described in Genesis. It clings with an intransigentism and bitterness far exceeding other part of America. Why? To Peter the problem appeared insoluble.

He sat by the window lost in his reverie. Just outside the ledge half a dozen English sparrows abused one another with chirps that came faintly through the small diamond panes. Their quick movements held Peter's eyes, and their endless quarreling presently recalled his episode with young Arkwright. It occurred to him, casually, that when Arkwright grew up he would subscribe to every reactionary doctrine set forth in the library Peter was indexing.

With that thought came a sort of mental flare, as if he were about to find the answer to the whole question through the concrete attack made on him by Sam.

It is an extraordinary feeling,—the sudden, joyful dawn of a new idea. Peter sat up sharply and leaned forward with a sense of being right on the fringe of a new and a great perception. Young Arkwright, the old Captain, the whole South, were unfolding themselves in a vast answer, when a movement outside the window caught the negro's introspective eyes.

A girl was passing; a girl in a yellow dress was passing the Renfrew gate. Even then Peter would not have wavered in his synthesis had not the girl paused slightly and given a swift side glance at the old manor. Then the man in the window recognized Cissie Dildine.

A slight shock traveled through Siner's body at the sight of Cissie's colorless face and darkened eyes. He stood up abruptly, with a feeling that he had some urgent thing to say to the young woman. His sharp movement toppled over the big globe.

The crash caused the girl to stop and look. For a moment they stood thus, the girl in the chill street, the man in the pleasant window, looking at each other. Next moment Cissie hurried on up the village street toward the Arkwright house. No doubt she was on her way to cook the noon meal.

Peter remained standing at the window, with a heavily beating heart. He watched her until she vanished behind a wing of the shrubbery in the Renfrew yard.

When she had gone, he looked at his books and cards, sat down, and tried to resume his indexing. But his mind played away from it like a restive horse. It had been two weeks since he last saw Cissie. Two weeks.... His nerves vibrated like the strings of a pianoforte. He had scarcely thought of her during the fortnight; but now, having seen her, he found himself powerless to go on with his work. He pottered a while longer among the books and cards, but they were meaningless. They appeared an utter futility. Why index a lot of nonsense? Somehow this recalled his flare, his adumbration of some great idea connected with young Arkwright and the old Captain, and the South.

He put his trembling nerves to work, trying to recapture his line of thought. He sat for ten minutes, following this mental train, then that, losing one, groping for another. His thoughts were jumpy. They played about Arkwright, the Captain, Cissie, his mother's death, Tump Pack in prison, the quarrel between the Persimmon and Jim Pink Staggs. The whole of Niggertown came rushing down upon him, seizing him in its passion and dustiness and greasiness, putting to flight all his cultivated white-man ideas.

After half an hour's searching he gave it up. Before he left the room he stooped, and tried to set up again the globe that the passing of the girl had caused him to throw down; but its pivot was out of plumb, and he had to lean it against the window-seat.

The sight of Captain Renfrew coming in at the gate sent Peter to his room. The hour was near twelve, and it had become a little point of household etiquette for the mulatto and the white man not to be together when old Rose jangled the triangle. By this means they forestalled the mute discourtesy of the old Captain's walking away from his secretary to eat. The subject of their separate meals had never been mentioned since their first acrimonious morning. The matter had dropped into the abeyance of custom, just as the old gentleman had predicted.

Peter had left open his jalousies, but his windows were closed, and now as he entered he found his apartment flooded with sunshine and filled with that equable warmth that comes of straining sunbeams through glass.

He prepared for dinner with his mind still hovering about Cissie. He removed a book and a lamp from the lion-footed table, and drew up an old chair with which the Captain had furnished his room. It was a delicate old Heppelwhite of rosewood. It had lost a finial from one of its back standards, and a round was gone from the left side. Peter never moved the chair that vague plans sometime to repair it did not occur to him.

When he had cleared his table and placed his chair beside it, he wandered over to his tall west window and stood looking up the street through the brilliant sunshine, toward the Arkwright home. No one was in sight. In Hooker's Bend every one dines precisely at twelve, and at that hour the streets are empty. It would be some time before Cissie came back down the street on her way to Niggertown. She first would have to wash and put away the Arkwright dishes. It would be somewhere about one o'clock. Nevertheless, he kept staring out through the radiance of the autumn sunlight with an irrational feeling that she might appear at any moment. He was afraid she would slip past and he not see her at all. The thought disturbed him somewhat. It kept him sufficiently on the alert to stand tapping the balls of his fingers against the glass and looking steadily toward the Arkwright house.

Presently the watcher perceived that a myriad spider-webs filled the sunshine with a delicate dancing glister. It was the month of voyaging spiders. Invisible to Peter, the tiny spinners climbed to the tip-most twigs of the dead weeds, listed their abdomens, and lassoed the wind with gossamer lariats; then they let go and sailed away to a hazard of new fortunes. The air was full of the tiny adventurers. As he stared up the street, Peter caught the glint of these invisible airships whisking away to whatever chance might hold for them. There was something epic in it. It recalled to the mulatto's mind some of Fabre's lovely descriptions. It reminded him of two or three books on entomology which he had left in his mother's cabin. He felt he ought to go after them while the spiders were migrating. He suddenly made up his mind he would go at once, as soon as he had had dinner; somewhere about one o'clock.

He looked again at the Arkwright house. The thought of walking down the street with Cissie, to get his books, quickened his heart.

He was still at the window when his door opened and old Rose entered with his dinner. She growled under her breath all the way from the door to the table on which she placed the tray. Only a single phrase detached itself and stood out clearly amid her mutterings, "Hope it chokes you."

Peter arranged his chair and table with reference to the window, so he could look up the street while he was eating his dinner.

The ill-wishing Rose had again furnished a gourmet's meal, but Peter's preoccupation prevented its careful and appreciative gustation. An irrational feeling of the octoroon's imminence spurred him to fast eating. He had hardly begun his soup before he found himself drinking swiftly, looking up the street over his spoon, as if he meant to rush out and swing aboard a passing train.

Siner checked his precipitation, annoyed at himself. He began again, deliberately, with an attempt to keep his mind on the savor of his food. He even thought of abandoning his little design of going for the books; or he would go at a different hour, or to-morrow, or not at all. He told himself he would far better allow Cissie Dildine to pass and repass unspoken to, instead of trying to arrange an accidental meeting. But the brown man's nerves wouldn't hear to it. That automatic portion of his brain and spinal column which, physiologists assert, performs three fourths of a man's actions and conditions nine tenths of his volitions— that part of Peter wouldn't consider it. It began to get jumpy and scatter havoc in Peter's thoughts at the mere suggestion of not seeing Cissie. Imperceptibly this radical left wing of his emotions speeded up his meal, again. He caught himself, stopped his knife and fork in the act of rending apart a broiled chicken.

"Confound it! I'll start when she comes in sight, no matter whether I've finished this meal or not," he promised himself.

And suddenly he felt unhurried, in the midst of a large leisure, with a savory broiled chicken dinner before him,—not exactly before him, either; most of it had been stuffed away. Only the fag-end remained on his plate. A perfectly good meal had been ruined by an ill-timed resistance to temptation.

The glint of a yellow dress far up the street had just prompted him to swift action when the door opened and old Rose put her head in to say that Captain Renfrew wanted to see Peter in the library.

The brown man came to a shocked standstill.

"What! Right now?" he asked.

"Yeah, right now," carped Rose. "Ever'thing he wants, he wants right now. He's been res'less as a cat in a bulldog's den ever sence he come home fuh dinner. Dunno whut's come into he ole bones, runnin' th'ugh his dinner lak a razo'-back." She withdrew in a continued mumble of censure.

Peter cast a glance up the street, timed Cissie's arrival at the front gate, picked up his hat, and walked briskly to the library in the hope of finishing any business the Captain might have, in time to encounter the octoroon. He even began making some little conversational plans with which he could meet Cissie in a simple, unstudied manner. He recalled with a certain satisfaction that he had not said a word of condemnation the night of Cissie's confession. He would make a point of that, and was prepared to argue that, since he had said nothing, he meant nothing. In fact he was prepared to throw away the truth completely and enter the conversation as an out-and-out opportunist, alleging whatever appeared to fit the occasion, as all men talk to all women.

The old Captain was just getting into his chair as Peter entered. He paused in the midst of lowering himself by the chair-arms and got erect again. He began speaking a little uncertainly:

"Ah—by the way, Peter—I sent for you—"

"Yes, sir." Peter looked out at the window.

The old gentleman scrutinized Peter a moment; then his faded eyes wandered about the library.

"Still working at the books, cross-indexing them—"

"Yes, sir." Peter could divine by the crinkle of his nerves the very loci of the girl as she passed down the thoroughfare.

"Very good," said the old lawyer, absently. He was obviously preoccupied with some other topic. "Very good," he repeated with racking deliberation; "quite good. How did that globe get bent?"

Peter, looking at it, did not remember either knocking it over or setting it up.

"I don't know," he said rapidly. "I hadn't noticed it."

"Old Rose did it," meditated the Captain aloud, "but it's no use to accuse her of it; she'd deny it. And yet, on the other hand, Peter, she'll be nervous until I do accuse her of it. She'll be dropping things, breaking up my china. I dare say I'd best accuse her at once, storm at her some to quiet her nerves, and get it over."

This monologue spurred Peter's impatience into an agony.

"I believe you were wanting me, Captain?" he suggested, with a certain urge for action.

The Captain's little pleasantry faded. He looked at Peter and became uncomfortable again.

"Well, yes, Peter. Downtown I heard—well, a rumor connected with you—"

Such an extraordinary turn caught the attention of even the fidgety Peter. He looked at his employer and wondered blankly what he had heard.

"I don't want to intrude on your private affairs, Peter, not at all— not—not in the least—"

"No-o-o," agreed Peter, completely at a loss.

The old gentleman rubbed his thin hands together, lifted his eyebrows up and down nervously. "Are—are you about to—to leave me, Peter?"

Peter was greatly surprised at the slightness and simplicity of this question and at the evidence of emotion it carried.

"Why, no," he cried; "not at all! Who told you I was? It is a deep gratification to me—"

"To be exact," proceeded the old man, with a vague fear still in his eyes, "I heard you were going to marry."

"Marry!" This flaw took Peter's sails even more unexpectedly than the other. "Captain, who in the world—who could have told—"

"Are you?"

"No."

"You aren't?"

"Indeed, no!"

"I heard you were going to marry a negress here in town called Cissie Dildine." A question was audible in the silence that followed this statement. The obscure emotion that charged all the old man's queries affected Peter.

"I am not, Captain," he declared earnestly; "that's settled."

"Oh—you say it's settled," picked up the old lawyer, delicately.

"Yes."

"Then you had thought of it?" Immediately, however, he corrected this breach of courtesy into which his old legal habit of cross-questioning had led him. "Well, at any rate," he said in quite another voice, "that eases my mind, Peter. It eases my mind. It was not only, Peter, the thought of losing you, but this girl you were thinking of marrying—let me warn you, Peter—she's a negress."

The mulatto stared at the strange objection.

"A negress!"

The old man paused and made that queer movement with his wrinkled lips as if he tasted some salty flavor.

"I—I don't mean exactly a—a negress," stammered the old gentleman; "I mean she's not a—a good girl, Peter; she's a—a thief, in fact—she's a thief—a thief, Peter. I couldn't endure for you to marry a thief, Peter."

It seemed to Peter Siner that some horrible compulsion kept the old Captain repeating over and over the fact that Cissie Dildine was a thief, a thief, a thief. The word cut the very viscera in the brown man. At last, when it seemed the old gentleman would never cease, Peter lifted a hand.

"Yes, yes," he gasped, with a sickly face, "I—I've heard that before."

He drew a shaken breath and moistened his lips. The two stood looking at each other, each profoundly at a loss as to what the other meant. Old Captain Renfrew collected himself first.

"That is all, Peter." He tried to lighten his tones. "I think I'll get to work. Let me see, where do I keep my manuscript?"

Peter pointed mechanically at a drawer as he walked out at the library door. Once outside, he ran to the front piazza, then to the front gate, and with a racing heart stood looking up and down the sleepy thoroughfare. The street was quite empty.



CHAPTER XI

Old Captain Renfrew was a trustful, credulous soul, as, indeed, most gentleman who lead a bachelor's life are. Such men lack that moral hardening and whetting which is obtained only amid the vicissitudes of a home; they are not actively and continuously engaged in the employment and detection of chicane; want of intimate association with a woman and some children begets in them a soft and simple way of believing what is said to them. And their faith, easily raised, is just as easily shattered. Their judgment lacks training.

Peter Siner's simple assertion to the old Captain that he was not going to marry Cissie Dildine completely allayed the old gentleman's uneasiness. Even the further information that Peter had had such a marriage under advisement, but had rejected it, did not put him on his guard.

From long non-intimacy with any human creature, the old legislator had forgotten that human life is one long succession of doing the things one is not going to do; he had forgotten, if he ever knew, that the human brain is primarily not a master, but a servant; its function is not to direct, but to devise schemes and apologies to gratify impulses. It is the ways and means committee to the great legislature of the body.

For several days after his fear that Peter Siner would marry Cissie Dildine old Captain Renfrew was as felicitous as a lover newly reconciled to his mistress. He ambled between the manor and the livery- stable with an abiding sense of well-being. When he approached his home in the radiance of high noon and saw the roof of the old mansion lying a bluish gray in the shadows of the trees, it filled his heart with joy to feel that it was not an old and empty house that awaited his coming, but that in it worked a busy youth who would be glad to see him enter the gate.

The fear of some unattended and undignified death which had beset the old gentleman during the last eight or ten years of his life vanished under Peter's presence. When he thought of it at all now, he always previsioned himself being lifted in Peter's athletic arms and laid properly on his big four-poster.

At times, when Peter sat working over the books in the library, the Captain felt a prodigious urge to lay a hand on the young man's broad and capable shoulder. But he never did. Again, the old lawyer would sit for minutes at a time watching his secretary's regular features as the brown man pursued his work with a trained intentness. The old gentleman derived a deep pleasure from such long scrutinies. It pleased him to imagine that, when he was young, he had possessed the same vigor, the same masculinity, the same capacity for persistent labor. Indeed, all old gentlemen are prone to choose the most personable and virile young man they can find for themselves to have been like.

The two men had little to say to each other. Their thoughts beat to such different tempos that any attempt at continued speech discovered unequal measures. As a matter of fact, in all comfortable human conversation, words are used as mere buoys dropped here and there to mark well-known channels of thought and feeling. Similarity of mental topography is necessary to mutual understanding. Between any two generations the landscape is so changed as to be unrecognizable. Our fathers are monarchists; our sons, bolsheviki.

Old Rose Hobbett was more of an age with the Captain, and these two talked very comfortably as the old virago came and went with food at meal-time. For instance, the Captain always asked his servant if she had fed his cat, and old Rose invariably would sulk and poke out her lips and put off answering to the last possible moment of insolence, then would grumble out that she was jes 'bout to feed the varmint, an' 't wuz funny nobody couldn't give a hard-wuckin' colored woman breathin'-space to turn roun' in.

This reply was satisfactory to the Captain, because he knew what it meant,—that Rose had half forgotten the cat, and had meant wholly to forget it, but since she had been snapped up, so to speak, in the very act of forgetting, she would dole it out a piece or two of the meat that she had meant to abscond with as soon as the dishes were done.

While Rose was fulminating, the old gentleman recalled his bent globe and decided the moment had come for a lecture on that point. It always vaguely embarrassed the Captain to correct Rose, and this increased his dignity. Now he cleared his throat in a certain way that brought the old negress to attention, so well they knew each other.

"By the way, Rose, in the future I must request you to use extraordinary precautions in cleansing and dusting articles of my household furniture, or, in case of damage, I shall be forced to withhold an indemnification out of your pay."

Eight or ten years ago, when the Captain first repeated this formula to his servant, the roll and swing of his rhetoric, and the last word, "pay," had built up lively hopes in Rose that the old gentleman was announcing an increase in her regular wage of a dollar a week. Experience, however, had long since corrected this faulty interpretation.

She came to a stand in the doorway, with her kinky gray head swung around, half puzzled, wholly rebellious.

"Whut is I bruk now?"

"My globe."

The old woman turned about with more than usual innocence.

"Why, I ain't tech yo' globe!"

"I foresaw that," agreed the Captain, with patient irony, "but in the future don't touch it more carefully. You bent its pivot the last time you refrained from handling it."

"But I tell you I ain't tech yo' globe!" cried the negress, with the anger of an illiterate person who feels, but cannot understand, the satire leveled at her.

"I agree with you," said the Captain, glad the affair was over.

This verbal ducking into the cellar out of the path of her storm stirred up a tempest.

"But I tell you I ain't bruk it!"

"That's what I said."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she flared; "you says I ain't, but when you says I ain't, you means I is, an' when you says I is, you means I ain't. Dat's de sort o' flapjack I's wuckin' fur!"

The woman flirted out of the dining-room, and the old gentleman drew another long breath, glad it was over. He really had little reason to quarrel about the globe, bent or unbent; he never used it. It sat in his study year in and year out, its dusty twinkle brightened at long intervals by old Rose's spiteful rag.

The Captain ate on placidly. There had been a time when he was dubious about such scenes with Rose. Once he felt it beneath his dignity as a Southern gentleman to allow any negro to speak to him disrespectfully. He used to feel that he should discharge her instantly and during the first years of their entente had done so a number of times. But he could get no one else who suited him so well; her biscuits, her corn-light- bread, her lye-hominy, which only the old darkies know how to make. And, to tell the truth, he missed the old creature herself, her understanding of him and his ideas, her contemporaneity; and no one else would work for a dollar a week.

Presently in the course of his eating the old gentleman required another biscuit, and he wanted a hot one. Three mildly heated disks lay on a plate before him, but they had been out of the oven for five minutes and had been reduced to an unappetizing tepidity.

A little hand-bell sat beside the Captain's plate whose special use was to summon hot biscuits. Now, the old lawyer looked at its worn handle speculatively. He was not at all sure Rose would answer the bell. She would say she hadn't heard it. He felt faintly disgruntled at not foreseeing this exigency and buttering two biscuits while they were hot, or even three.

He considered momentarily a project of going after a hot biscuit for himself, but eventually put it by. South of the Mason-Dixon Line, self- help is half-scandal. At last, quite dubiously, he did pick up the bell and gave it a gentle ring, so if old Rose chose not to hear it, she probably wouldn't: thus he could believe her and not lose his temper and so widen an already uncomfortable breach.

To the Captain's surprise, the old creature not only brought the biscuits, but she did it promptly. No sooner had she served them, however, than the Captain saw she really had returned with a new line of defense.

She mumbled it out as usual, so that her employer was forced to guess at a number of words: "Dat nigger, Peter, mus' 'a' busted yo' gl—"

"No, he didn't."

"Mus' uv."

"No, he didn't. I asked him, and he said he didn't."

The old harridan stared, and her speech suddenly became clear-cut:

"Well, 'fo' Gawd, I says I didn't, too!"

At this point the Captain made an unintelligible sound and spread the butter on his hot biscuit.

"He's jes a nigger, lak I is," stated the cook, warmly.

The Captain buttered a second hot biscuit.

"We's jes two niggers."

The Captain hoped she would presently sputter herself out.

"Now look heah," cried the crone, growing angrier and angrier as the reaches of the insult spread itself before her, "is you gwine to put one o' us niggers befo' de udder? Ca'se ef you is, I mus' say, it's Kady- lock-a-do' wid me."

The Captain looked up satirically.

"What do you mean by Katie-lock-the-door with you?" he asked, though he had an uneasy feeling that he knew.

"You know whut I means. I means I 's gwine to leab dis place."

"Now look here, Rose," protested the lawyer, with dignity, "Peter Siner occupies almost a fiduciary relation to me."

The old negress stared with a slack jaw. "A relation o' yo's!"

The lawyer hesitated some seconds, looking at the hag. His high-bred old face was quite inscrutable, but presently he said in a serious voice:

"Peter occupies a position of trust with me, Rose."

"Yeah," mumbled Rose; "I see you trus' him."

"One day he is going to do me a service, a very great service, Rose."

The hag continued looking at him with a stubborn expression.

"You know better than any one else, Rose, my dread of some—some unmannerly death—"

The old woman made a sound that might have meant anything.

"And Peter has promised to stay with me until—until the end."

The old negress considered this solemn speech, and then grunted out:

"Which en'?"

"Which end?" The Captain was irritated.

"Yeah; yo' en' or Peter's en'?"

"By every law of probability, Peter will outlive me."

"Yeah, but Peter 'll come to a en' wid you when he ma'ies dat stuck-up yellow fly-by-night, Cissie Dildine."

"He's not going to marry her," said the Captain, comfortably.

"Huh!"

"Peter told me he didn't intend to marry Cissie Dildine."

"Shu! Then whut fur dey go roun' peepin' at each other lak a couple o' niggers roun' a haystack?"

The old lawyer was annoyed.

"Peeping where?"

"Why, right in front o' dis house, dat's wha; ever' day when dat hussy passes up to de Arkwrights', wha she wucks. She pokes along an' walls her eyes roun' at dis house lak a calf wid de splivins."

"That going on now?"

"Ever' day."

A deep uneasiness went through the old man. He moistened his lips.

"But Peter said—"

"Good Gawd! Mars' Renfrew, whut diff'ence do it make whut Peter say? Ain't you foun' out yit when a he-nigger an' a she-nigger gits to peepin' at each udder, whut dey says don't lib in de same neighbo'hood wid whut dey does?"

This was delivered with such energy that it completely undermined the Captain's faith in Peter, and the fact angered the old gentleman.

"That'll do, Rose; that'll do. That's all I need of you."

The old crone puffed up again at this unexpected flare, and went out of the room, plopping her feet on floor and mumbling. Among these ungracious sounds the Captain caught, "Blin' ole fool!" But there was no need becoming offended and demanding what she meant. Her explanation would have been vague and unsatisfactory.

The verjuice which old Rose had sprinkled over Peter and Cissie by calling them "he-nigger" and "she-nigger" somehow minimized them, animalized them in the old lawyer's imagination. Rose's speech was charged with such contempt for her own color that it placed the mulatto and the octoroon down with apes and rabbits.

The lawyer fought against his feeling, for the sake of his secretary, who had come to occupy so wide a sector of his comfort and affection. Yet the old virago evidently spoke from a broad background of experience. She was at least half convincing. While the Captain repelled her charge against his quiet, hard-working brown helper, he admitted it against Cissie Dildine, whom he did not know. She was an animal, a female centaur, a wanton and a strumpet, as all negresses are wantons and strumpets. All white men in the South firmly believe that. They believe it with a peculiar detestation; and since they used these persons very profitably for a hundred and fifty years as breeding animals, one might say they believe it a trifle ungratefully.



CHAPTER XII

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 reestablish 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.