Birthright - T.S. Stribling
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?"