'You-you Mean You Want M-me—to Go With You, Cissie?' He Stammered'You-you Mean You Want M-me—to Go With You, Cissie?' He Stammered
'You-you Mean You Want M-me—to Go With You, Cissie?' He Stammered'You-you Mean You Want M-me—to Go With You, Cissie?' He Stammered
"I—I d-don't want to travel a-alone, Peter," she gasped.
Her look, her voice suddenly brought home to the an the amazing connotation of her words. He stared at her, felt his face grow warm with a sharp, peculiar embarrassment. He hardly knew what to say or do before her intent and piteous eyes.
"You—you mean you want m-me—to go with you, Cissie?" he stammered.
The girl suddenly began trembling, now that her last reserve of indirection had been torn away.
"Listen, Peter," she began breathlessly. "I'm not the sort of woman you think. If I hadn't accused myself, we'd be married now. I—I wanted you more than anything in the world, Peter, but I did tell you. Surely, surely, Peter, that shows I am a good woman—th-the real I. Dear, dear Peter, there is a difference between a woman and her acts. Peter, you're the first man in all my life, in a-all my life who ever came to me k- kindly and gently; so I had to l-love you and t-tell you, Peter."
The girl's wavering voice broke down completely; her face twisted with grief. She groped for her chair, sat down, buried her face in her arms on the table, and broke into a chattering outbreak of sobs that sounded like some sort of laughter.
Her shoulders shook; the light gleamed on her soft, black Caucasian hair. There was a little rent in one of the seams in her cheap jacket, at one of the curves where her side molded into her shoulder. The customer made garment had found Cissie's body of richer mold than it had been designed to shield. And yet in Peter's distress and tenderness and embarrassment, this little rent held his attention and somehow misprized the wearer.
It seemed symbolic in the searching white light. He could see the very break in the thread and the widened stitches at the ends of the rip. Her coat had given way because she was modeled more nearly like the Venus de Milo than the run of womankind. He felt the little irony of the thing, and yet was quite unable to resist the comparison.
And then, too, she had referred again to her sin of peculation. A woman enjoys confessions from a man. A man's sins are mostly vague, indefinite things to a woman, a shadowy background which brings out the man in a beautiful attitude of repentance; but when a woman confesses, the man sees all her past as a close-up with full lighting. He has an intimate acquaintance with just what she's talking about, and the woman herself grows shadowy and unreal. Men have too many blots not to demand whiteness in women. By striking some such average, nature keeps the race a going moral concern.
So Peter, as he stood looking down on the woman who was asking him to marry her, was filled with as unhappy and as impersonal a tenderness as a born brother. He recalled the thoughts which had come to him when he saw Cissie passing his window. She was not the sort of woman he wanted to marry; she was not his ideal. He cast about in his head for some gentle way of putting her off, so that he would not hurt her any further, if such an easement were possible.
As he stood thinking, he found not a pretext, but a reality. He stooped over, and put a hand lightly on each of her arms.
"Cissie," he said in a serious, even voice, "if I should ever marry any one, it would be you."
The girl paused in her sobbing at his even, passionless voice.
"Then you—you won't?" she whispered in her arms.
"I can't, Cissie." Now that he was saying it, he uttered the words very evenly and smoothly. "I can't, dear Cissie, because a great work has just come into my life." He paused, expecting her to ask some question, but she lay silent, with her face in her arms, evidently listening.
"Cissie, I think, in fact I know, I can demonstrate to all the South, both white and black, the need of a better and more sincere understanding between our two races."
Peter did not feel the absurdity of such a speech in such a place. He patted her arm, but there was something in the warmth of her flesh that disturbed his austerity and caused him to lift his hand to the more impersonal axis of her shoulder. He proceeded to develop his idea.
"Cissie, just a moment ago you were complaining of the insults you meet everywhere. I believe if I can spread my ideas, Cissie, that even a pretty colored girl like you may walk the streets without being subjected to obscenity on every corner." His tone unconsciously patronized Cissie's prettiness with the patronage of the male for the less significant thing, as though her ripeness for love and passion and children were, after all, not comparable with what he, a male, could do in the way of significantly molding life.
Cissie lifted her head and dried her eyes.
"So you aren't going to marry me, Peter?" Woman-like, now that she was well into the subject, she was far less embarrassed than Peter. She had had her cry.
"Why—er—considering this work, Cissie—"
"Aren't you going to marry anybody, Peter?"
The artist in Peter, the thing the girl loved in him, caught again that Messianic vision of himself.
"Why, no, Cissie," he said, with a return of his inspiration of an hour ago; "I'll be going here and there all over the South preaching this gospel of kindliness and tolerance, of forgiveness of the faults of others." Cissie looked at him with a queer expression. "I'll show the white people that they should treat the negro with consideration not for the sake of the negro, but for the sake of themselves. It's so simple, Cissie, it's so logical and clear—"
The girl shook her head sadly.
"And you don't want me to go with you, Peter?"
"Why, n-no, Cissie; a girl like you couldn't go. Perhaps I'll be misunderstood in places, perhaps I may have to leave a town hurriedly, or be swung over the walls, like Paul, in a basket." He attempted to treat it lightly.
But the girl looked at him with a horror dawning in her melancholy face.
"Peter, do you really mean that?" she whispered.
"Why, truly. You don't imagine—"
The octoroon opened her dark eyes until she might have been some weird.
"Oh, Peter, please, please put such a mad idea away from you! Peter, you've been living here alone in this old house until you don't see things clearly. Dear Peter, don't youknow?You can't go out and talk like that to white folks and—and not have some terrible thing happen to you! Oh, Peter, if you would only marry me, it would cure you of such wildness!" Involuntarily she got up, holding out her arms to him, offering herself to his needs, with her frightened eyes fixed on his.
It made him exquisitely uncomfortable again. He made a little sound designed to comfort and reassure her. He would do very well. He was something of a diplomat in his way. He had got along with the boys in Harvard very well indeed. In fact, he was rather a man of the world. No need to worry about him, though it was awfully sweet of her.
Cissie picked up her handkerchief with its torn edge, which she had laid on the table. Evidently she was about to go.
"I surely don't know what will become of me," she said, looking at it.
In a reversal of feeling Peter did not want her to go away quite then. He cast about for some excuse to detain her a moment longer.
"Now, Cissie," he began, "if you are really going to leave Hooker's Bend—"
"I'm not going," she said, with a long exhalation. "I—" she swallowed— "I just thought that up to—ask you to—to—You see," she explained, a little breathless, "I thought you still loved me and had forgiven me by the way you watched for me every day at the window."
This speech touched Peter more keenly than any of the little drama the girl had invented. It hit him so shrewdly he could think of nothing more to say.
Cissie moved toward the window and undid the latch.
"Good night, Peter." She paused a moment, with her hand on the catch. "Peter," she said, "I'd almost rather see you marry some other girl than try so terrible a thing."
The big, full-blooded athlete smiled faintly.
"You seem perfectly sure marriage would cure me of my mission."
Cissie's face reddened faintly.
"I think so," she said briefly. "Good night," and she disappeared in the dark space she had opened, and closed the jalousies softly after her.
Cissie Dildine's conviction that marriage would cure Peter of his mission persisted in the mulatto's mind long after the glamour of the girl had faded and his room had regained the bleak emptiness of a bachelor's bedchamber.
Cissie had been so brief and positive in her statement that Peter, who had not thought on the point at all, grew more than half convinced she was right.
Now that he pondered over it, it seemed there was a difference between the outlook of a bachelor and that of a married man. The former considered humanity as a balloonist surveys a throng,—immediately and without perspective,—but the latter always sees mankind through the frame of his family. A single man tends naturally to philosophy and reform; a married man to administration and statesmanship. There have been no great unmarried statesmen; there have been no great married philosophers or reformers.
Now that Cissie had pointed out this universal rule, Peter saw it very clearly. And Peter suspected that beneath this rough classification, and conditioning it, lay a plexus of obscure mental and physical reactions set up by the relations between husband and wife. It might very well be there was a difference between the actual cerebral and nervous structure of a married man and that of a single man.
At any rate, after these reflections, Peter now felt sure that marriage would cure him of his mission; but how had Cissie known it? How had she struck out so involved a theory, one might say, in the toss of a head? The more Peter thought it over the more extraordinary it became. It was another one of those explosive ideas which Cissie, apparently, had the faculty of creating out of a pure mental vacuum.
All this philosophy aside, Cissie's appearance just in the nick of his inspiration, her surprising proposal of marriage, and his refusal, had accomplished one thing: it had committed Peter to the program he had outlined to the girl.
Indeed, there seemed something fatalistic in such a concatenation of events. Siner wondered whether or not he would have obeyed his vision without this added impulse from Cissie. He did not know; but now, since it had all come about just as it had, he suspected he would have been neglectful. He felt as if a dangerous but splendid channel had been opened before his eyes, and almost at the same instant a hand had reached down and directed his life into it. This fancy moved the mulatto. As he got himself ready for bed, he kept thinking:
"Well, my life is settled at last. There is nothing else for me to do. Even if this should end terribly for me, as Cissie imagines, my life won't be wasted."
Next morning Peter Siner was awakened by old Rose Hobbett thrusting her head in at his door, staring around, and finally, seeing Peter in bed, grumbling:
"Why is you still heah, black man?"
The secretary opened his eyes in astonishment.
"Why shouldn't I be here?"
"Nobody wuz 'speckin' you to be heah." The crone withdrew her head and vanished.
Peter wondered at this unaccustomed interest of Rose, then hurried out of bed, supposing himself late for breakfast.
A dense fog had come up from the river, and the moisture floating into his open windows had dampened his whole room. Peter stepped briskly to the screen and began splashing himself. It was only in the midst of his ablutions that he remembered his inspiration and resolve of the previous evening. As he squeezed the water over his powerfully molded body, he recalled it almost impersonally. It might have happened to some third person. He did not even recall distinctly the threads of the logic which had lifted him to such a Pisgah, and showed him the whole South as a new and promised land. However, he knew that he could start his train of thought again, and again ascend the mountain.
Floating through the fog into his open window came the noises of the village as it set about living another day, precisely as it had lived innumerable days in the past. The blast of the six-o'clock whistle from the planing-mill made the loose sashes of his windows rattle. Came a lowing of cows and a clucking of hens, a woman's calling. The voices of men in conversation came so distinctly through the pall that it seemed a number of persons must be moving about their morning work, talking and shouting, right in the Renfrew yard.
But the thing that impressed Peter most was the solidity and stability of this Southern village that he could hear moving around him, and its certainty to go on in the future precisely as it had gone on in the past. It was a tremendous force. The very old manor about him seemed huge and intrenched in long traditions, while he, Peter Siner, was just a brown man, naked behind a screen and rather cold from the fog and damp of the morning.
He listened to old Rose clashing the kitchen utensils. As he drew on his damp underwear, he wondered what he could say to old Rose that would persuade her into a little kindliness and tolerance for the white people. As he listened he felt hopeless; he could never explain to the old creature that her own happiness depended upon the charity she extended to others. She could never understand it. She would live and die precisely the same bitter old beldam that she was, and nothing could ever assuage her.
While Peter was thinking of the old creature, she came shuffling along the back piazza with his breakfast. She let herself in by lifting one knee to a horizontal, balancing the tray on it, then opening the door with her freed hand.
When the shutter swung open, it displayed the crone standing on one foot, wearing a man's grimy sock, which had fallen down over a broken, run-down shoe.
In Peter's mood the thought of this wretched old woman putting on such garments morning after morning was unspeakably pathetic. He thought of his own mother, who had lived and died only a shade or two removed from the old crone's condition.
Rose put down her foot, and entered the room with her lips poked out, ready to make instant attack if Peter mentioned his lack of supper the night before.
"Aunt Rose," asked the secretary, with his friendly intent in his tones, "how came you to look in this morning and say you didn't expect to find me in my room?"
She gave an unintelligible grunt, pushed the lamp to one side, and eased her tray to the table.
Peter finished touching his tie before one of those old-fashioned mirrors, not of cut-glass, yet perfectly true. He came from the mirror and moved his chair, out of force of habit, so he could look up the street toward the Arkwrights'.
"Aunt Rose," said the young man, wistfully, "why are you always angry?"
She bridled at this extraordinary inquiry.
"Me?"
"Yes, you."
She hesitated a moment, thinking how she could make her reply a personal assault on Peter.
"'Cause you come heah, 'sputin' my rights, da' 's' why."
"No," demurred Peter, "you were quarreling in the kitchen the first morning I came here, and you didn't know I was on the place."
"Well—I got my tribulations," she snapped, staring suspiciously at these unusual questions.
There was a pause; then Peter said placatingly:
"I was just thinking, Aunt Rose, you might forget your tribulations if you didn't ride them all the time."
"Hoccum! What you mean, ridin' my tribulations?"
"Thinking about them. The old Captain, for instance; you are no happier always abusing the old Captain."
The old virago gave a sniff, tossed her head, but kept her eyes rolled suspiciously on Peter.
"Very often the way we think and act makes us happy or unhappy," moralized Peter, broadly.
"Look heah, nigger, you ain't no preacher sont out by de Lawd to me!"
"Anyway, I am sure you would feel more friendly toward the Captain if you acted openly with him; for instance, if you didn't take off all his cold victuals, and handkerchiefs and socks, soap, kitchenware—"
The cook snorted.
"I'd feel dat much mo' nekked an' hongry, dat's how I'd feel."
"Perhaps, if you'd start over, he might give you a better wage."
"Huh!" she snorted in an access of irony. "I see dat skinflint gib'n' me a better wage. Puuh!" The suddenly she realized where the conversation had wandered, and stared at the secretary with widening eyes "Good Lawd! Did dat fool Cap'n set up a nigger in dis bedroom winder jes to ketch ole Rose packin' off a few ole lef'-overs?" Peter began a hurried denial, but she rushed on: "'Fo' Gawd, I hopes his viddles chokes him! I hope his ole smoke-house falls down on his ole haid. I hope to Jesus—"
Peter pleaded with her not to think the Captain was behind his observations, but the hag rushed out of the bedroom, swinging her head from side to side, uttering the most terrible maledictions. She would show him! She wouldn't put another foot in his old kitchen. Wild horses couldn't drag her into his smoke-house again.
Peter ran to the door and called after her down the piazza, trying to exonerate the Captain: but she either did not or would not hear, and vanished into the kitchen, still furious.
Old Rose made Peter so uneasy that he deserted his breakfast midway and hurried to the library. In the solemn old room he found the Captain alone and in rather a pleased mood. The old gentleman stood patting and alining a pile of manuscript. As the mulatto entered he exclaimed:
"Well, here's Peter again!" as if his secretary had been off on a long journey. Immediately afterward he added, "Peter, guess what I did last night." His voice was full of triumph.
Peter was thinking about Aunt Rose, and stood looking at the Captain without the slightest idea.
"I wrote all of this,"—he indicated his manuscript,—"over a hundred pages."
Peter considered the work without much enthusiasm.
"You must have worked all night."
The old attorney rubbed his hands.
"I think I may claim a touch of inspiration last night, Peter. Reminiscences rippled from under my pen, propitious words, prosperous sentences. Er—the fact is, Peter, you will see, when you begin copying, I had come to a matter—a—a matter of some moment in my life. Every life contains such moments, Peter. I had meant to write something in the nature of a defen—an explanation, Peter. But after you left the library last night it suddenly occurred to me just to give each fact as it took place, quite frankly. So I did that—not—not what I meant to write, at all—ah. As you copy it, you may find it not entirely without some interest to yourself, Peter."
"To me?" repeated Peter, after the fashion of the unattentative.
"Yes, to yourself." The Captain was oddly moved. He took his hands off the script, walked a little away from the table, came back to it. "It— ah—may explain a good many things that—er—may have puzzled you." He cleared his throat and shifted his subject briskly. "We ought to be thinking about a publisher. What publisher shall we have publish these reminiscences? Make some stir in Tennessee's political circles, Peter; tremendous sales; clear up questions everybody is interested in. H-m—well, I'll walk down town and you"—he motioned to the script— "begin copying—"
"By the way, Captain," said Peter as the old gentleman turned for the door, "has Rose said anything to you yet?"
The old man detached his mind from his script with an obvious effort.
"What about?"
"About leaving your service."
"No-o, not especially; she's always leaving my service."
"But in this case it was my fault; at least I brought it about. I remonstrated with her about taking your left-over victuals and socks and handkerchiefs and things. She was quite offended."
"Yes, it always offends her," agreed the old man, impatiently. "I never mention it myself unless I catch her red-handed; then I storm a little to keep her in bounds."
Naturally, Peter knew of this extraordinary system of service in the South; nevertheless he was shocked at its implications.
"Captain," suggested Peter, "wouldn't you find it to your own interest to give old Rose a full cash payment for her services and allow her to buy her own things?"
The Captain dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand. "She's a nigger, Peter; you can't hire a nigger not to steal. Born in 'em. Then I'm not sure but what it would be compounding a felony, hiring a person not to steal; might be so construed. Well, now, there's the script. Read it carefully, my boy, and remember that in order to gain a certainstatus quocertain antecedents are—are absolutely necessary, Peter. Without them my—my life would have been quite empty, Peter. It's—it's very strange—amazing. You will understand as you read. I'll be back to dinner, so good-by." In the strangest agitation the old Captain walked out of the library. The last glimpse Peter had of him was his meager old figure silhouetted against the cold gray fog that filled the compound.
Neither the Captain's agitation nor his obvious desire that Peter should at once read the new manuscript really got past the threshold of the mulatto's consciousness. Peter's thoughts still hovered about old Rose, and from that point spread to the whole system of colored service in the South. For Rose's case was typical. The wage of cooks in small Southern villages is a pittance—and what they can steal. The tragedy of the mothers of a whole race working for their board and thievings came over Peter with a rising grimness. And there was no public sentiment against such practice. It was accepted everywhere as natural and inevitable. The negresses were never prosecuted; no effort was made to regain the stolen goods. The employers realized that what they paid would not keep soul and body together; that it was steal or perish.
It was a fantastic truth that for any colored girl to hire into domestic service in Hooker's Bend was more or less entering an apprenticeship in peculation. What she could steal was the major portion of her wage, if two such anomalous terms may be used in conjunction.
Yet, strange to say, the negro women of the village were quite honest in other matters. They paid their small debts. They took their mistresses' pocket-books to market and brought back the correct change. And if a mistress grew too indignant about something they had stolen, they would bring it back and say: "Here is a new one. I'd rather buy you a new one than have you think I would take anything."
The whole system was the lees of slavery, and was surely the most demoralizing, the most grotesque method of hiring service in the whole civilized world. It was so absurd that its mere relation lapses into humor, that bane of black folk.
Such painful thoughts filled the gloomy library and harassed Peter in his copying. He took his work to the window and tried to concentrate upon it, but his mind kept playing away.
Indeed, it seemed to Peter that to sit in this old room and rewrite the wordy meanderings of the old gentleman's book was the very height of emptiness. How utterly futile, when all around him, on every hand, girls like Cissie Dildine were being indentured to corruption! And, as far as Peter knew, he was the only person in the South who saw it or felt it or cared anything at all about it.
When Cissie Dildine came to the surface of Peter's mind she remained there, whirling around and around in his chaotic thoughts. He began talking to her image, after a certain dramatic trick of his mind, and she began offering her environment as an excuse for what had come between them and estranged them. She stole, but she had been trained to steal. She was a thief, the victim of an immense immorality. The charm of Cissie, her queer, swift-working intuition, the candor of her confession, her voluptuousness—all came rushing down on Peter, harassing him with anger and love and desire. To copy any more script became impossible. He lost his place; he hardly knew what he was writing.
He flung aside the whole work, got to his feet with the imperative need of an athlete for the open. He started out of the room, but as an afterthought scribbled a nervous line, telling the Captain he might not be back for dinner. Then he found his hat and coat and walked briskly around the piazza to the front gate.
The trees and shrubs were dripping, but the fog had almost cleared away, leaving only a haze in the air. A pale, level line of it cut across the scarp of the Big Hill. The sun shone with a peculiar soft light through the vapors.
As Peter passed out at the gate, the fancy came to him that he might very well be starting on his mission. It came with a sort of surprise. He wondered how other men had set about reforms. With unpremeditation? He wondered to whom Jesus of Nazareth preached his first sermon. The thought of that young Galilean, sensitive, compassionate, inexperienced, speaking to his first hearer, filled Peter with a strange trembling tenderness. He looked about the familiar street of Hooker's Bend, the old trees over the pavement, the shabby village houses, and it all held a strangeness when thus juxtaposed to the thought of Nazareth nineteen hundred years before.
The mulatto started down the street with his footsteps quickened by a sense of spiritual adventure.
On the corner, against the blank south wall of Hobbett's store, Peter Siner saw the usual crowd of negroes warming themselves in the soft sunshine. They were slapping one another, scuffling, making feints with knives or stones, all to an accompaniment of bragging, profanity, and loud laughter. Their behavior was precisely that of adolescent white boys of fifteen or sixteen years of age.
Jim Pink Staggs was furnishing much amusement with an impromptu sleight- of-hand exhibition. The black audience clustered around Jim Pink in his pinstripe trousers and blue-serge coat. They exhibited not the least curiosity as to the mechanics of the tricks, but asked for more and still more, with the naïve delight of children in the mysterious.
Peter Siner walked down the street with his Messianic impulse strong upon him. He was in that stage of feeling toward his people where a man's emotions take the color of religion. Now, as he approached the crowd of negroes, he wondered what he could say, how he could transfer to them the ideas and the emotion that lifted up his own heart.
As he drew nearer, his concern mounted to anxiety. Indeed, what could he say? How could he present so grave a message? He was right among them now. One of the negroes jostled him by striking around his body at another negro. Peter stopped. His heart beat, and he had a queer sensation of being operated by some power outside himself. Next moment he heard himself saying in fairly normal tones:
"Fellows, do you think we ought to be idling on the street corners like this? We ought to be at work, don't you think?"
The horse-play stopped at this amazing sentiment.
"Whuffo, Peter?" asked a voice.
"Because the whole object of our race nowadays is to gain the respect of other races, and more particularly our own self-respect. We haven't it now. The only way to get it is to work, work, work."
"Ef you feel lak you'd ought to go to wuck," suggested one astonished hearer, "you done got my p'mission, black boy, to hit yo' natchel gait to de fust job in sight."
Peter was hardly less surprised than his hearers at what he was saying. He paid no attention to the interruption.
"Fellows, it's the only way our colored people can get on and make the most out of life. Persistent labor is the very breath of the soul, men; it—it is." Here Peter caught an intimation of the whole flow of energy through the universe, focusing in man and being transformed into mental and moral values. And it suddenly occurred to him that the real worth of any people was their efficiency in giving this flow of force moral and spiritual forms. That is the end of man; that is what is prefigured when a baby's hand reaches for the sun. But Peter considered his audience, and his thought stammered on his tongue. The Persimmon, with his protruding, half-asleep eyes, was saying:
"I don' know, Peter, as I 's so partic'lar 'bout makin' de mos' out'n dis worl'. You know de Bible say—hit say,"—here the Persimmon's voice dropped a tone lower, in unconscious imitation of negro preachers,—"la- ay not up yo' treasure on uth, wha moss do corrup', an' thieves break th'ughan'steal."
Came a general nodding and agreement of soft, blurry voices.
"'At sho whut it say, black man!"
"Sho do!"
"Lawd God loves a nigger on a street corner same as He do a millionaire in a six-cylinder, Peter."
"Sho do, black man; but He's jes about de onlies' thing on uth 'at do."
"Well, I don' know," came a troubled rejoinder. "Thaiuh 's de debbil, ketchin' mo' niggers nowadays dan he do white men, I 'fo' Gawd b'liebes."
"Well, dat's because deyisso many mo' niggers dan dey is white folks," put in a philosopher.
"Whut you say 'bout dat, Brudder Peter?" inquired the Persimmon, seriously. None of this discussion was either derision or burlesque. None of the crowd had the slightest feeling that these questions were not just as practical and important as the suggestion that they all go to work.
When Peter realized how their ignorant and undisciplined thoughts flowed off into absurdities, and that they were entirely unaware of it, it brought a great depression to his heart. He held up a hand with an earnestness that caught their vagrant attention.
"Listen!" he pleaded. "Can't you see how much there is for us black folks to do, and what little we have done?"
"Sho is a lot to do; we admits dat," said Bluegum Frakes. "But whut's de use doin' hit ef we kin manage to shy roun' some o' dat wuck an' keep on libin' anyhow, specially wid wages so high?"
The question stopped Peter. Neither his own thoughts, nor any book that he had ever read nor any lecture that he had heard ever attempted to explain the enormous creative urge which is felt by every noble mind, and which, indeed, is shared to some extent by every human creature. Put to it like that, Siner concocted a sort of allegory, telling of a negro who was shiftless in the summer and suffered want in the winter, and applied it to the present high wage and to the low wage that was coming; but in his heart Peter knew such utilitarianism was not the true reason at all. Men do not weave tapestries to warm themselves, or build temples to keep the rain away.
The brown man passed on around the corner, out of the faint warmth of the sunshine and away from the empty and endless arguments which his coming had provoked among the negroes.
The futile ending of his first adventure surprised Peter. He walked uncertainly up the business street of the village, hardly knowing where to turn next.
Cold weather had driven the merchants indoors, and the thoroughfare was quite deserted except for a few hogs rooting among the refuse heaps piled in front of the stores. It was not a pleasant sight, and it repelled Peter all the more because he was accustomed to the antiseptic look of a Northern city. He walked up to the third door from the corner, when a buzz of voices brought him to a standstill and finally persuaded him inside.
At the back end of a badly lighted store a circle of white men and boys had formed around an old-fashioned, egg-shaped stove. Near by, on some meal-bags, sat two negroes, one of whom wore a broad grin, the other, a funny, sheepish look.
The white men were teasing the latter negro about having gone to jail for selling a mortgaged cow. The men went about their fun-making leisurely, knowing quite well the negro could not get angry or make any retort or leave the store, all of these methods of self-defense being ruled out by custom.
"You must have forgot your cow was mortgaged, Bob."
"No-o-o, suh; I—I—I didn't fuhgit," drawling his vowels to a prodigious length.
"Didn't you know you'd get into trouble?"
"No-o-o, suh."
"Know it now, don't you?"
"Ya-a-s, suh."
"Have a good time in jail, Bob?"
"Ya-a-s, suh. Shot cra-a-aps nearly all de time tull de jailer broke hit up."
"Wouldn't he let you shoot any more?"
"No-o-o, suh; not after he won all our money." Here Bob flung up his head, poked out his lips like a bugle, and broke into a grotesque, "Hoo! hoo! hoo!" It was such an absurd laugh, and Bob's tale had come to such an absurd denouement, that the white men roared, and shuffled their feet on the flared base of the stove. Some spat in or near a box filled with sawdust, and betrayed other nervous signs of satisfaction. When a man so spat, he stopped laughing abruptly, straightened his face, and stared emptily at the rusty stove until further inquisition developed some other preposterous escapade in Bob's jail career.
The merchant, looking up at one of these intermissions, saw Peter standing at his counter. He came out of the circle and asked Peter what he wanted. The mulatto bought a package of soda and went out.
The chill north wind smelled clean after the odors of the store. Peter stood with his package of soda, breathing deeply, looking up and down the street, wondering what to do next. Without much precision of purpose, he walked diagonally across the street, northward toward a large faded sign that read, "Killibrew's Grocery." A little later Peter entered a big, rather clean store which smelled of spices, coffee, and a faint dash of decayed potatoes. Mr. Killibrew himself, a big, rotund man, with a round head of prematurely white hair, was visible in a little glass office at the end of his store. Even through the glazed partition Peter could see Mr. Killibrew smiling as he sat comfortably at his desk. Indeed, the grocer's chief assets were a really expansive friendliness and a pleasant, easily provoked laughter.
He was fifty-two years old, and had been in the grocery business since he was fifteen. He had never been to school at all, but had learned bookkeeping, business mathematics, salesmanship, and the wisdom of the market-place from his store, from other merchants, and from the drummers who came every week with their samples and their worldly wisdom. These drummers were, almost to a man, very sincere friends of Mr. Killibrew, and not infrequently they would write the grocer from the city, or send him telegrams, advising him to buy this or to unload that, according to the exigencies of the market. As a result of this was very well off indeed, and all because he was a friendly, agreeable sort of man.
The grocer heard Peter enter and started to come out of his office, when Peter stopped him and asked if he might speak with him alone.
The white-haired man with the pink, good-natured face stood looking at Peter with rather a questioning but pleasant expression.
"Why, certainly, certainly." He turned back to the swivel-chair at his desk, seated himself, and twisted about on Peter as he entered. Mr. Killibrew did not offer Peter a seat,—that would have been an infraction of Hooker's Bend custom,—but he sat leaning back, evidently making up his mind to refuse Peter credit, which he fancied the mulatto would ask for and yet do it pleasantly.
"I was wondering, Mr. Killibrew," began Peter feeling his way along, "I was wondering if you would mind talking over a little matter with me. It's considered a delicate subject, I believe, but I thought a frank talk would help."
During the natural pauses of Peter's explanation Mr. Killibrew kept up a genial series of nods and ejaculations.
"Certainly, Peter. I don't see why, Peter. I'm sure it will help, Peter."
"I'd like to talk frankly about the relations of our two races in the South, in Hooker's Bend."
The grocer stopped his running accompaniment of affirmations and looked steadfastly at Peter. Presently he seemed to solve some question and broke into a pleasant laugh.
"Now, Peter, if this is some political shenanigan, I must tell you I'm a Democrat. Besides that, I don't care a straw about politics. I vote, and that's all."
Peter put down the suspicion that he was on a political errand.
"Not that at all, Mr. Killibrew. It's a question of the white race and the black race. The particular feature I am working on is the wages paid to cooks."
"I didn't know you were a cook," interjected the grocer in surprise.
"I am not."
Mr. Killibrew looked at Peter, thought intensely for a few moments, and came to an unescapable conclusion.
"You don't mean you've formed a cook's union here in Hooker's Bend, Peter!" he cried, immensely amazed.
"Not at all. It's this," clarified Peter. "It may seem trivial, but it illustrates the principle I'm trying to get at. Doesn't your cook carry away cold food?"
It required perhaps four seconds for the merchant to stop his speculations on what Peter had come for and adjust his mind to the question.
"Why, yes, I suppose so," he agreed, very much at sea. "I—I never caught up with her." He laughed a pleasant, puzzled laugh. "Of course she doesn't come around and show me what she's making off with. Why?"
"Well, it's this. Wouldn't you prefer to give your cook a certain cash payment instead of having her taking uncertain amounts of your foodstuffs and wearing apparel?"
The merchant leaned forward in his chair.
"Did old Becky Davis send you to me with any such proposition as that, Peter?"
"No, not at all. But, Mr. Killibrew, wouldn't you like better and more trustworthy servants as cooks, as farm-hands, chauffeurs, stable-boys? You see, you and your children and your children's children are going to have to depend on negro labor, as far as we can see, to the end of time."
"We-e-ell, yes," admitted Mr. Killibrew, who was not accustomed to considering the end of time.
"Wouldn't it be better to have honest, self-respecting help than dishonest help?"
"Certainly."
"Then let's think about cooks. How can one hope to rear an honest, self- respecting citizenry as long as the mothers of the race are compelled to resort to thievery to patch out an insufficient wage?"
"Why, I don't suppose niggers ever will be honest," admitted the grocer, very frankly. "You naturally don't trust a nigger. If you credit one for a dime, the next time he has any money he'll go trade somewhere else." The grocer broke into his contagious laugh. "Do you know how I've built up my business here, Peter? By never trusting a nigger." Mr. Killibrew continued his pleased chuckle. "Yes, I get the whole cash trade of the niggers in Hooker's Bend by never cheating one and never trusting one."
The grocer leaned back in his squeaking chair and looked out through the glass partition, over the brightly colored packages that lined his shelves from floor to ceiling. All that prosperity had come about through a policy of honesty and distrust. It was something to be proud of.
"Now, let me see," he proceeded, recurring pleasantly to what he recalled of Peter's original proposition: "Aunt Becky sent you here to tell me if I'd raise her pay, she'd stop stealin' and—and raise some honest children." Mr. Killibrew threw back his head broke into loud, jelly-like laughter. "Why, don't you know, Peter, she's an old liar. If I gave her a hundred a week, she'd steal. And children! Why, the old humbug! She's too old; she's had her crop. And, besides all that, I don't mind what the old woman takes. It isn't much. She's a good old darky, faithful as a dog." He arose from his swivel-chair briskly and floated Peter out before him. "Tell her, if she wants a raise," he concluded heartily, "and can't pinch enough out of my kitchen and the two dollars I pay her—tell her to come to me, straight out, and I'll give her more, and she can pinch more."
Mr. Killibrew moved down the aisle of his store between fragrant barrels and boxes, laughing mellowly at old Aunt Becky's ruse, as he saw it. As he turned Peter out, he invited him to come again when he needed anything in the grocery line.
And he was so pleasant, hearty, and sincere in his friendliness toward both Peter and old Aunt Becky that Peter, even amid the complete side- tracking and derailing of his mission, decided that it ever he did have occasion to purchase any groceries, he would do his trading at this market ruled by an absolute honesty with, and a complete distrust in, his race.
At the conclusion of the Killibrew interview Peter instinctively felt that he had just about touched the norm of Hooker's Bend. The village might contain men who would dive a little deeper into the race question with Peter; assuredly, there would be hundreds who would not dive so deep. Mr. Killibrew's attitude on the race question turned on how to hold the negro patronage of the village to his grocery. It was not an abstract question at all, but a concrete fact, which he had worked out to his own satisfaction. With Mr. Killibrew, with all Hooker's Bend, there was no negro question.