Birthright - T.S. Stribling
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.
But old Captain Renfrew was far from appreciating any such bravura in
scarlet and gold. At first he put it down to mere niggerish taste, and
his dislike for the girl edged his stricture; then, on second thought,
the oddness of sumac for a nosegay caught his attention. Nobody used
sumac for a buttonhole. He had never heard of any woman, white or black,
using sumac for a bouquet. Why should this Cissie Dildine trig herself
out in sumac?
The Captain's suspicions came to a point like a setter. He began
sniffing about for Cissie's motives in choosing so queer an ornament. He
wondered if it had anything to do with Peter Siner.
All his life, Captain Renfrew's brain had been deliberate. He moved
mentally, as he did physically, with dignity. To tell the truth, the
Captain's thoughts had a way of absolutely stopping now and then, and
for a space he would view the world as a simple collection of colored
surfaces without depth or meaning. During these intervals, by a sort of
irony of the gods the old gentleman's face wore a look of philosophic
concentration, so that his mental hiatuses had given him a reputation
for profundity, which was county wide. It had been this, years before,
that had carried him by a powerful majority into the Tennessee
legislature. The voters agreed, almost to a man, that they preferred
depth to a shallow facility. The rival candidate had been shallow and
facile. The polls returned the Captain, and the young gentleman--for the
Captain was a young gentleman in those days--was launched on a typical
politician's career. But some Republican member from east Tennessee had
impugned the rising statesman's honor with some sort of improper
liaison. In those days there seemed to be proper and improper liaisons.
There had been a duel on the banks of the Cumberland River in which the
Captain succeeded in wounding his traducer in the arm, and was thus
vindicated by the gods. But the incident ended a career that might very
well have wound up in the governor's chair, or even in the United States
Senate, considering how very deliberate the Captain was mentally.
To-day, as the Captain walked up the street following Cissie Dildine,
one of these vacant moods fell upon him and it was not until they had
reached his own gate that it suddenly occurred to the old gentleman just
what Cissie's sumac did mean. It was a signal to Peter. The simplicity
of the solution stirred the old man. Its meaning was equally easy to
fathom. When a woman signals any man it conveys consent. Denials receive
no signals; they are inferred. In this particular case Captain Renfrew
found every reason to believe that this flaring bit of sumac was the
prelude to an elopement.
In the window of his library the Captain saw his secretary staring at
his cards and books with an intentness plainly assumed. Peter's fixed
stare had none of those small movements of the head that mark genuine
intellectual labor. So Peter was posing, pretending he did not see the
girl, to disarm his employer's suspicions,--pretending not to see a
girl rigged out like that!
Such duplicity sent a queer spasm of anguish through the old lawyer.
Peter's action held half a dozen barbs for the Captain. A fellow-alumnus
of Harvard staying in his house merely for his wage and keep! Peter bore
not the slightest affection for him; the mulatto lacked even the
chivalry to notify the Captain of his intentions, because he knew the
Captain objected. And yet all these self-centered objections were
nothing to what old Captain Renfrew felt for Peter's own sake. For Peter
to marry a nigger and a strumpet, for him to elope with a wanton and a
thief! For such an upstanding lad, the very picture of his own virility
and mental alertness when he was of that age, for such a boy to fling
himself away, to drop out of existence--oh, it was loathly!
The old man entered the library feeling sick. It was empty. Peter had
gone to his room, according to his custom. But in this particular
instance it seemed to Captain Renfrew his withdrawal was flavored with a
tang of guilt. If he were innocent, why should not such a big, strong
youth have stayed and helped an old gentleman off with his overcoat?
The old Captain blew out a windy breath as he helped himself out of his
coat in the empty library. The bent globe still leaned against the
window-seat. The room had never looked so somber or so lonely.
At dinner the old man ate so little that Rose Hobbett ceased her
monotonous grumbling to ask if he felt well. He said he had had a hard
day, a difficult day. He felt so weak and thin that he foretold the gray
days when he could no longer creep to the village and sit with his
cronies at the livery-stable, when he would be house-fast, through
endless days, creeping from room to room like a weak old rat in a huge
empty house, finally to die in some disgusting fashion. And Now Peter
was going to leave him, was going to throw himself away on a lascivious
wench. A faint moisture dampened the old man's withered eyes. He drank
an extra thimbleful of whisky to try to hearten himself. Its bouquet
filled the time-worn stateliness of the dining-room.
* * * * *
During the weeks of Peter's stay at the manor it had grown to be the
Captain's habit really to write for two or three hours in the afternoon,
and his pile of manuscript had thickened under his application.
The old man was writing a book called "Reminiscences of Peace and War."
His book would form another unit of that extraordinary crop of personal
reminiscences of the old South which flooded the presses of America
during the decade of 1908-18. During just that decade it seemed as if the
aged men and women of the South suddenly realized that the generation who
had lived through the picturesqueness and stateliness of the old slave
regime was almost gone, and over their hearts swept a common impulse to
commemorate, in the sunset of their own lives, its fading splendor and
its vanished deeds.
On this particular afternoon the Captain settled himself to work, but
his reminiscences did not get on. He pinched a bit of floss from the nib
of his pen and tried to swing into the period of which he was writing.
He read over a few pages of his copy as mental priming, but his thoughts
remained flat and dull. Indeed, his whole life, as he reviewed it in the
waning afternoon, appeared empty and futile. It seemed hardly worth
while to go on.
The Captain had come to that point in his memoirs where the Republican
representative from Knox County had set going the petard which had
wrecked his political career.
From the very beginnings of his labors the old lawyer had looked forward
to writing just this period of his life. He meant to clear up his name
once for all. He meant to use invective, argument, testimony and a
powerful emotional appeal, such as a country lawyer invariably attempts
with a jury.