Birthright Part 28

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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.ds 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 c.u.mberland River in which the Captain succeeded in wounding his traducer in the arm, and was thus vindicated by the G.o.ds. 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 a.s.sumed. 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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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 ma.n.u.script 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.

But now that he had arrived at the actual composition of his defense, he sat biting his penholder, with all the arguments he meant to advance slipped from his mind. He could not recall the points of the proof. He could not recall them with Peter Siner moving restlessly about the room, glancing through the window, unsettled, nervous, on the verge of eloping with a negress.

His secretary's tragedy smote the old man. The necessity of doing something for Peter put his thoughts to rout. A wild idea occurred to the Captain that if he should write the exact truth, perhaps his memoirs might serve Peter as a signal against a futile, empty journey.

But the thought no sooner appeared than it was rejected. In the Anglo- Saxon, especially the Anglo-Saxon of the Southern United States, abides no such Gallic frankness as moved a Jean-Jacques. Southern memoirs always sound like the conversation between two maiden ladies,--nothing intimate, simply a few general remarks designed to show from what nice families they came.

So the Captain wrote nothing. During all the afternoon he sat at his desk with a leaden heart, watching Peter move about the room. The old man maintained more or less the posture of writing, but his thoughts were occupied in pitying himself and pitying Peter. Half a dozen times he looked up, on the verge of making some plea, some remonstrance, against the madness of this brown man. But the sight of Peter sitting in the window-seat staring out into the street silenced him. He was a weak old man, and Peter's nerves were strung with the desire of youth.

At last the two men heard old Rose clashing in the kitchen. A few minutes later the secretary excused himself from the library, to go to his own room. As Peter was about to pa.s.s through the door, the Captain was suddenly galvanized into action by the thought that this perhaps was the last time he would ever see him. He got up from his chair and called shakenly to Peter. The negro paused. The Captain moistened his lips and controlled his voice.

"I want to have a word with you, Peter, about a--a little matter. I-- I've mentioned it before."

"Yes, sir." The negro's tone and att.i.tude reminded the Captain that the supper gong would soon sound and they would best separate at once.

"It--it's about Cissie Dildine," the old lawyer hurried on.

Peter nodded slightly.

"Yes, you mentioned that before."

The old man lifted a thin hand as if to touch Peter's arm, but he did not. A sort of desperation seized him.

"But listen, Peter, you don't want to do--what's in your mind!"

"What is in my mind, Captain?"

"I mean marry a negress. You don't want to marry a negress!"

The brown man stared, utterly blank.

"Not marry a negress!"

"No, Peter; no," quavered the old man. "For yourself it may make no difference, but your children--think of your children, your son growing up under a brown veil! You can't tear it off. G.o.d himself can't tear it off! You can never reach him through it. Your children, your children's children, a terrible procession that stretches out and out, marching under a black shroud, unknowing, unknown! All you can see are their sad forms beneath the shroud, marching away--marching away. G.o.d knows where!

And yet it's your own flesh and blood!"

Suddenly the old lawyer's face broke into the hard, tearless contortions of the aged. His terrible emotion communicated itself to the sensitive brown man.

"But, Captain, I myself am a negro. Whom should I marry?"

"No one; no one! Let your seed wither in your loins! It's better to do that; it's better--" At that moment the clashing of the supper gong fell on the old man's naked nerves. He straightened up by some reflex mechanism, turned away from what he thought was his last interview with his secretary, and proceeded down the piazza into the great empty dining-room.

CHAPTER XIII

With overwrought nerves Peter Siner entered his room. At five o'clock that afternoon he had seen Cissie Dildine go up the street to the Arkwright home to cook one of those occasional suppers. He had been watching for her return, and in the midst of it the Captain's extraordinary outburst had stirred him up.

Once in his room, the negro placed the broken Hepplewhite in such a position that he could rake the street with a glance. Then he tried to compose himself and await the coming of his supper and the pa.s.sage of Cissie. There was something almost pathetic in Peter's endless watching, all for a mere glimpse or two of the girl in yellow. He himself had no idea how his nerves and thoughts had woven themselves around the young woman. He had no idea what a pa.s.sion this continual doling out of glimpses had begotten. He did not dream how much he was, as folk navely put it, in love with her.

His love was strong enough to make him forget for a while the old lawyer's outbreak. However, as the dusk thickened in the shrubbery and under the trees, certain of the old gentleman's phrases revisited the mulatto's mind: "A terrible procession ... marching under a black shroud.... Your children, your children's children, a terrible procession,... marching away, G.o.d knows where.... And yet--it's your own flesh and blood!" They were terrific sentences, as if the old man had been trying to tear from his vision some sport of nature, some deformity. As the implications spread before Peter, he became more and more astonished at its content. Even to Captain Renfrew black men were dehumanized,--shrouded, untouchable creatures.

It delivered to Peter a slow but a profound shock. He glanced about at the faded magnificence of the room with a queer feeling that he had been introduced into it under a sort of misrepresentation. He had taken up his abode with the Captain, at least on the basis of belonging to the human family, but this pa.s.sionate outbreak, this puzzling explosion, cut that ground from under his feet.

The more Peter thought about it, the stranger grew his sensation. Not even to be cla.s.sed as a human being by this old gentleman who in a weak, helpless fashion had crept somewhat into Peter's affections,--not to be considered a man! The mulatto drew a long, troubled breath, and by the mere mechanics of his desire kept staring through the gloom for Cissie.

Peter Siner had known all along that the unread whites of Hooker's Bend --and that included nearly every white person in the village--considered black men as simple animals; but he had supposed that the more thoughtful men, of whom Captain Renfrew was a type, at least admitted the Afro- American to the common brotherhood of humanity. But they did not.

As Peter sat staring into the darkness the whole effect of the dehumanizing of the black folk of the South began to unfold itself before his imagination. It explained to him the tragedies of his race, their sufferings at the hand of mob violence; the casualness, even the levity with which black men were murdered: the chronic dishonesty with which negroes were treated: the constant enactment of adverse legislation against them; the cynical use of negro women. They were all vermin, animals; they were one with the sheep and the swine; a little nearer the human in form, perhaps, and, oddly enough, one that could be bred to a human being, as testified a mult.i.tude of brown and yellow and cream-colored folk, but all marching away, as the Captain had so pa.s.sionately said, marching away, their forms hidden from human intercourse under a shroud of black, an endless procession marching away, G.o.d knew whither! And yet they were the South's own flesh and blood.

The horror of such a complex swelled in Peter's mind to monstrous proportions. As night thickened at his window, the negro sat dazed and wondering at the mightiness of his vision. His thoughts went groping, trying to solve some obscure problem it posed. He thought of the Arkwright boy; he thought of the white men smiling as his mother's funeral went past the livery-stable; he thought of Captain Renfrew's ma.n.u.script that he was transcribing. Through all the old man's memoirs ran a certain lack of sincerity. Peter always felt amid his labors that the old Captain was making an attorney's plea rather than a candid exposition. At this point in his thoughts there gradually limned itself in the brown man's mind the answer to that enigma which he almost had unraveled on the day he first saw Cissie Dildine pa.s.s his window. With it came the answer to the puzzle contained in the old Captain's library.

The library was not an ordinary compilation of the world's thought; it, too, was an attorney's special pleading against the equality of man. Any book or theory that upheld the equality of man was carefully excluded from the shelves. Darwin's great hypothesis, and every development springing from it, had been banned, because the moment that a theory was propounded of the great biologic relationship of all flesh, from worms to vertebrates, there instantly followed a corollary of the brotherhood of man.

What Christ did for theology, Darwin did for biology,--he democratized it. The One descended to man's brotherhood from the Trinity; the other climbed up to it from the worms.

The old Captain's library lacked sincerity. Southern orthodoxy, which persists in pouring its religious thought into the outworn molds of special creation, lacks sincerity. Scarcely a department of Southern life escapes this fundamental att.i.tude of special pleader and disingenuousness. It explains the Southern fondness for legal subtleties. All attempts at Southern poetry, belles-lettres, painting, novels, bear the stamp of the special plea, of authors whose exposition is careful.

Peter perceived what every one must perceive, that when letters turn into a sort of glorified prospectus of a country, all value as literature ceases. The very breath of art and interpretation is an eager and sincere searching of the heart. This sincerity the South lacks. Her single talent will always be forensic, because she is a lawyer with a cause to defend. And such is the curse that arises from lynchings and venery and extortions and dehumanizings,--sterility; a dumbness of soul.