"Then your need has brought me a pleasure, at least." Some impulse kept the secretary making those foolish complimentary speeches which keep a conversation empty and insincere.
"Oh, Peter, I didn"t come here for you to talk like that! Will you do what I want?"
"What do you want, Cissie?" he asked, sobered by her voice and manner.
"I want you to help me, Peter."
"All right, I will." He s.p.a.ced his words with his speculations about the nature of her request. "What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to help me go away."
Peter looked at her in surprise. He hardly knew what he had been expecting, but it was not this.
Some repressed emotion crept into the girl"s voice.
"Peter, I--I can"t stay here in Hooker"s Bend any longer. I want to go away. I--I"ve got to go away."
Peter stood regarding her curiously and at the same time sympathetically.
"Where do you want to go, Cissie?"
The girl drew a long breath; her bosom lifted and dropped abruptly.
"I don"t know; that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about."
"You don"t know where you want to go?" He smiled faintly. "How do you know you want to go at all?"
"Oh, Peter, all I know is I must leave Hooker"s Bend!" She gave a little shiver. "I"m tired of it, sick of it--sick." She exhaled a breath, as if she were indeed physically ill. Her face suggested it; her eyes were shadowed. "Some Northern city, I suppose," she added.
"And you want me to help you?" inquired Peter, puzzled.
She nodded silently, with a woman"s instinct to make a man guess the favor she is seeking.
Then it occurred to Peter just what sort of a.s.sistance the girl did want. It gave him a faint shock that a girl could come to a man to beg or to borrow money. It was a white man"s shock, a notion he had picked up in Boston, because it happens frequently among village negroes, and among them it holds as little significance as children begging one another for bites of apples.
Peter thought over his bank balance, then started toward a chest of drawers where he kept his checkbook.
"Cissie, if I can he of any service to you in a substantial way, I"ll be more than glad to--"
She put out a hand and stopped him; then talked on in justification of her determination to go away.
"I just can"t endure it any longer, Peter." She shuddered again. "I can"t stand n.i.g.g.e.rtown, or this side of town--any of it. They--they have no _feeling_ for a colored girl, Peter, not--not a speck!" She rave a gasp, and after a moment plunged on into her wrongs: "When--when one of us even walks past on the street, they--they whistle and say a-all kinds of things out loud, j-just as if w-we weren"t there at all. Th- they don"t c-care; we"re just n-n.i.g.g.e.r w-women." Cissie suddenly began sobbing with a faint catching noise, her full bosom shaken by the spasms; her tears slowly welling over. She drew out a handkerchief with a part of its lace edge gone, and wiped her eyes and cheeks, holding the bit of cambric in a ball in her palm, like a negress, instead of in her fingers, like a white woman, as she had been taught. Then she drew a deep breath, swallowed, and became more composed.
Peter stood looking in helpless anger at this representative of all women of his race.
"Cissie, that"s street-corner sc.u.m--the dirty sewage--"
"They make you feel naked," went on Cissie in the monotone that succeeds a fit of weeping, "and ashamed--and afraid." She blinked her eyes to press out the undue moisture, and looked at Peter as if asking what else she could do about it than to go away from the village.
"Will it be any better away from here?" suggested Peter, doubtfully.
Cissie shook her head.
"I--I suppose not, if--if I go alone."
"I shouldn"t think so," agreed Peter, somberly. He started to hearten her by saying white women also underwent such trials, if that would be a consolation; but he knew very well that a white woman"s hardships were as nothing compared to those of a colored woman who was endowed with any grace whatever.
"And besides, Cissie," went on Peter, who somehow found himself arguing against the notion of her going, "I hardly see how a decent colored woman gets around at all. Colored boarding-houses are wretched places. I ate and slept in one or two, coming home. Rotten." The possibility of Cissie finding herself in such a place moved Peter.
The girl nodded submissively to his judgment, and said in a queer voice: "That"s why I--I didn"t want to travel alone, Peter."
"No, it"s a bad idea--" and then Peter perceived that a queer quality was creeping into the tete-a-tete.
She returned his look unsteadily, but with a curious persistence.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "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 embarra.s.sment. 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 embarra.s.sment, 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 st.i.tches 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sing 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 eas.e.m.e.nt 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, pa.s.sionless 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."