Cissie laughed accommodatingly.
"I wonder why it"s necessary for everybody to know that once. I did. I could follow the circulation the right way or backward."
"Must have been harder backward, going against the current."
Cissie laughed again. A girl"s part in a witty conversation might seem easy at first sight. She has only to laugh at the proper intervals.
However, these intervals are not always distinctly marked. Some girls take no chances and laugh all the time.
Cissie"s appreciation was the sedative Peter needed. The relief of her laughter and her presence ran along his nerves and unkinked them, like a draft of Kentucky Special after a debauch. The curves of her cheek, the tilt of her head, and the lift of her dull-blue blouse at the bosom wove a great restfulness about Peter. The brooch of old gold glinted at her throat. The heavy screen of the arbor gave them a sweet sense of privacy. The conversation meandered this way and that, and became quite secondary to the feeling of the girl"s nearness and sympathy. Their talk drifted back to Peter"s mission here in Hooker"s Bend, and Cissie was saying:
"The trouble is, Peter, we are out of our _milieu_." Some portion of Peter"s brain that was not basking in the warmth and invitation of the girl answered quite logically:
"Yes, but if I could help these people, Cissie, reconstruct our life here culturally--"
Cissie shook her head. "Not culturally."
This opposition shunted more of Peter"s thought to the topic in hand. He paused interrogatively.
"Racially," said Cissie.
"Racially?" repeated the man, quite lost.
Cissie nodded, looking straight into his eyes. "You know very well, Peter, that you and I are not--are not anything near full bloods. You know that racially we don"t belong in--n.i.g.g.e.rtown."
Peter never knew exactly how this extraordinary sentence had come about, but in a kind of breath he realized that he and this almost white girl were not of n.i.g.g.e.rtown. No doubt she had been arguing that he, Peter, who was one sort of man, was trying to lead quite another sort of men moved by different racial impulses, and such leading could only come to confusion. He saw the implications at once.
It was an extraordinary idea, an explosive idea, such as Cissie seemed to have the faculty of touching off. He sat staring at her.
It was the white blood in his own veins that had sent him struggling up North, that had brought him back with this flame in his heart for his own people. It was the white blood in Cissie that kept her struggling to stand up, to speak an unbroken tongue, to gather around her the delicate atmosphere and charm of a gentlewoman. It was the Caucasian in them buried here in n.i.g.g.e.rtown. It was their part of the tragedy of millions of mixed blood in the South. Their common problem, a feeling of their joint isolation, brought Peter to a sense of keen and tingling nearness to the girl.
She was talking again, very earnestly, almost tremulously:
"Why don"t you go North, Peter? I think and think about you staying here. You simply can"t grow up and develop here. And now, especially, when everybody doubts you. If you"d go North--"
"What about you, Cissie? You say we"re together--"
"Oh, I"m a woman. We haven"t the chance to do as we will."
A kind of t.i.tillation went over Peter"s scalp and body.
"Then you are going to stay here and marry--Tump?" He uttered the name in a queer voice.
Tears started in Cissie"s eyes; her bosom lifted to her quick breathing.
"I--I don"t know what I"m going to do," she stammered miserably.
Peter leaned over her with a drumming heart; he heard her catch her breath.
"You don"t care for Tump?" he asked with a dry mouth.
She gasped out something, and the next moment Peter felt her body sink limply in his groping arms. They clung together closely, quiveringly.
Three nights of vigil, each thinking miserably and wistfully of the other, had worn the nerves of both man and girl until they were ready to melt together at a touch. Her soft body clinging to his own, the little nervous pressures of her arms, her eased breathing at his neck, wiped away Siner"s long sense of strain. Strength and peace seemed to pour from her being into his by a sort of spiritual osmosis. She resigned her head to his palm in order that he might lift her lips to his when he pleased. After all, there is no way for a man to rest without a woman.
All he can do is to stop work.
For a long time they sat transported amid the dusty honeysuckles and withered blooms, but after a while they began talking a little at a time of the future, their future. They felt so indissolubly joined that they could not imagine the future finding them apart. There was no need for any more trouble with Tump Pack. They would marry quietly, and go away North to live. Peter thought of his friend Farquhar. He wondered if Farquhar"s att.i.tude would be just the same toward Cissie as it was toward him.
"North," was the burden of the octoroon"s dreams. They would go North to Chicago. There were two hundred and fifty thousand negroes in Chicago, a city within itself three times the size of Nashville. Up North she and Peter could go to theaters, art galleries, could enter any church, could ride in street-cars, railroad-trains, could sleep and eat at any hotel, live authentic lives.
It was Cissie planning her emanc.i.p.ation, planning to escape her lifelong disabilities.
"Oh, I"ll be so glad! so glad! so glad!" she sobbed, and drew Peter"s head pa.s.sionately down to her deep bosom.
CHAPTER V
Peter Siner walked home from the Dildine cabin that night rather dreading to meet his mother, for it was late. Cissie had served sandwiches and coffee on a little table in the arbor, and then had kept Peter hours afterward. Around him still hung the glamour of Cissie"s little supper. He could still see her rounded elbows that bent softly backward when she extended an arm, and the glimpses of her bosom when she leaned to hand him cream or sugar. She had accomplished the whole supper in the white manner, with all poise and daintiness. In fact, no one is more exquisitely polite than an octoroon woman when she desires to be polite, when she elevates the subserviency of her race into graciousness.
However, the pleasure and charm of Cissie were fading under the approaching abuse that Caroline was sure to pour upon the girl. Peter dreaded it. He walked slowly down the dark semicircle, planning how he could best break to his mother the news of his engagement. Peter knew she would begin a long bill of complaints,--how badly she was treated, how she had sacrificed herself, her comfort, how she had washed and scrubbed. She would surely charge Cissie with being a thief and a drab, and all the announcements of engagements that Peter could make would never induce the old woman to soften her abuse. Indeed, they would make her worse.
So Peter walked on slowly, smelling the haze of dust that hung in the blackness. Out on the Big Hill, in the glade, Peter caught an occasional glimmer of light where c.r.a.p-shooters and boot-leggers were beginning their nightly carousal.
These evidences of illicit trades brought Peter a thrill of disgust. In a sort of clear moment he saw that he could not keep Cissie in such a sty as this. He could not rear in such a place as this any children that might come to him and Cissie. His thoughts drifted back to his mother, and his dread of her tongue.
The Siner cabin was dark and tightly shut when Peter let himself in at the gate and walked to the door. He stood a moment listening, and then gently pressed open the shutter. A faint light burned on the inside, a night-lamp with an old-fashioned bra.s.s bowl. It sat on the floor, turned low, at the foot of his mother"s bed. The mean room was mainly in shadow. The old-style four-poster in which Caroline slept was an indistinct mound. The air was close and foul with the bad ventilation of all negro sleeping-rooms. The bra.s.s lamp, turned low, added smoke and gas to the tight quarters.
The odor caught Peter in the nose and throat, and once more stirred up his impatience with his mother"s disregard of hygiene. He tiptoed into the room and decided to remove the lamp and open the high, small window to admit a little air. He moved noiselessly and had stooped for the lamp when there came a creaking and a heavy sigh from the bed, and the old negress asked:
"Is dat you, son?"
Peter was tempted to stand perfectly still and wait till his mother dozed again, thus putting off her inevitable tirade against Cissie; but he answered in a low tone that it was he.
"Whut you gwine do wid dat lamp, son?"
"Go to bed by it, Mother."
"Well, bring hit back." She breathed heavily, and moved restlessly in the old four-poster. As Peter stood up he saw that the patched quilts were all askew over her shapeless bulk. Evidently, she had not been resting well.
Peter"s conscience smote him again for worrying his mother with his courtship of Cissie, yet what could he do? If he had wooed any other girl in the world, she would have been equally jealous and grieved. It was inevitable that she should be disappointed and bitter; it was bound up in the very part and parcel of her sacrifice. A great sadness came over Peter. He almost wished his mother would berate him, but she continued to lie there, breathing heavily under her disarranged covers.
As Peter pa.s.sed into his room, the old negress called after him to remind him to bring the light back when he was through with it.
This time something in her tone alarmed Peter. He paused in the doorway.
"Are you sick, Mother?" he asked.