"But, Mother--" he began defensively, "I--"

"Me sweatin' over de wash-pot," the negress went on, "so's you could go up North an' learn a lil sense; heah you comes back chasin' a dutty s.l.u.t!"

"But, Mother," he begged thickly, "I was simply walking home with Miss Dildine."

"Miss Dildine! Miss Dildine!" exploded the ponderous woman, with an erasing gesture. "Ef you means dat stuck-up fly-by-night Cissie Dildine, say so, and don' stan' thaiuh mouthin', 'Miss Dildine, Miss Dildine'!"

"Mother," asked Peter, thickly, through his swelling mouth, "do you want to know what did happen?"

"I knows. I tol' you to keep away fum dat hussy. She's a fool 'bout her bright color an' straight hair. Needn't be givin' herse'f no airs!"

Peter stood in the doorway, steadying himself by the jamb. The world still swayed from the blows he had received on the head.

"What girl would you be willing for me to go with?" he asked in faint satire.

"Heah in n.i.g.g.e.rtown?"

Peter nodded. The movement increased his headache.

"None a-tall. No n.i.g.g.e.rtown wench a-tall. When you mus' ma'y, I's 'speckin' you to go off summuhs an' pick yo' gal, lak you went off to pick yo' aidjucation." She swung out a thick arm, and looked at Peter out of the corner of her eyes, her head tilted to one side, as negresses do when they become dramatically serious.

Peter left his mother to her stare and went to his own room. This constant implication among n.i.g.g.e.rtown inhabitants that n.i.g.g.e.rtown and all it held was worthless, mean, unhuman depressed Peter. The mulatto knew the real trouble with n.i.g.g.e.rtown was it had adopted the white village's estimate of it. The sentiment of the white village was overpowering among the imitative negroes. The black folk looked into the eyes of the whites and saw themselves reflected as chaff and sk.u.m and slime, and no human being ever suggested that they were aught else.

Peter's room was a rough shed papered with old newspapers. All sorts of yellow scare-heads streaked his walls. Hanging up was a crayon enlargement of his mother, her broad face as unwrinkled as an egg and drawn almost white, for the picture agents have discovered the only way to please their black patrons is to make their enlargements as nearly white as possible.

In one corner, on a home-made book-rack, stood Peter's library,--a Greek book or two, an old calculus, a sociology, a psychology, a philosophy, and a score of other volumes he had acc.u.mulated in his four college years. As Peter, his head aching, looked at these, he realized how immeasurably removed he was from the cool abstraction of the study.

The brown man sat down in an ancient rocking-chair by the window, leaned back, and closed his eyes. His blood still whispered in his ears from his fight. Notwithstanding his justification, he gradually became filled with self-loathing. To fight--to hammer and kick in n.i.g.g.e.rtown's dust-- over a girl! It was an indignity.

Peter shifted his position in his chair, and his thoughts took another trail. Tump's attack had been sudden and silent, much like a bulldog's.

The possibility of a simple friendship between a woman and a man never entered Tump's head; it never entered any n.i.g.g.e.rtown head. Here all attraction was reduced to the simplest terms of s.e.x. n.i.g.g.e.rtown held no delicate intimacies or reserves. Two youths could not go with the same girl. Black women had no very great powers of choice over their suitors.

The strength of a man's arm isolated his sweetheart. That did not seem right, resting the power of successful mating entirely upon brawn.

As Peter sat thinking it over, it came to him that the progress of any race depended, finally, upon the woman having complete power of choosing her mate. It is woman alone who consistently places the love accent upon other matters than mere flesh and muscle. Only woman has much s.e.x selectiveness, or is inclined to select individuals with qualities of mind and spirit.

For millions of years these instinctive spiritualizers of human breeding stock have been hampered in their choice of mates by the unrestrained right of the fighting male. Indeed, the great constructive work of chivalry in the middle ages was to lay, unconsciously, the corner-stone of modern civilization by resigning to the woman the power of choosing from a group of males.

Siner stirred in his chair, surprised at whither his reverie had lead him. He wondered how he had stumbled upon these thoughts. Had he read them in a book? In point of fact, a beating administered by Tump Pack had brought the brown man the first original idea he had entertained in his life.

By this time, Peter's jaw had reached its maximum swelling and was eased somewhat. He looked out of his little window, wondering whether Cissie Dildine would choose him--or Tump Pack.

Peter was surprised to find blue dusk peering through his panes. All the scare-heads on his walls had lapsed into a common obscurity. As he rose slowly, so as not to start his head hurting again, he heard three rapid pistol shots in the cedar glade between n.i.g.g.e.rtown and the white village. He knew this to be the time-honored signal of boot-leggers announcing that illicit whisky was for sale in the blackness of the glade.

CHAPTER IV

Next day the Siner-Pack fight was the focus of news interest in Hooker's Bend. White mistresses extracted the story from their black maids, and were amused by it or deprecated Cissie Dildine's morals as the mood moved them.

Along Main Street in front of the village stores, the merchants and hangers-on discussed the affair. It was diverting that a graduate of Harvard should come back to Hooker's Bend and immediately drop into such a fracas. Old Captain Renfrew, one-time attorney at law and representative of his county in the state legislature, sat under the mulberry in front of the livery-stable and plunged into a long monologue, with old Mr. Tomwit as listener, on the uneducability of the black race.

"Take a horse, sir," expounded the captain; "a horse can be trained to add and put its name together out of an alphabet, but no horse could ever write a promissory note and figure the interest on it, sir. Take a dog. I've known dogs, sir, that could bring your mail from the post- office, but I never saw a dog stop on the way home, sir, to read a post- card."

Here the old ex-attorney spat and renewed the tobacco in a black brier, then proceeded to draw the parrallel between dogs and horses and Peter Siner newly returned from Harvard.

"G.o.d'lmighty has set his limit on dogs, horses, and n.i.g.g.e.rs, Mr. Tomwit.

Thus far and no farther. Take a n.i.g.g.e.r baby at birth; a n.i.g.g.e.r baby has no fontanelles. It has no window toward heaven. Its skull is sealed up in darkness. The n.i.g.g.e.r brain can never expand and absorb the universe, sir. It can never rise on the wings of genius and weigh the stars, nor compute the swing of the Pleiades. Thus far and no farther! It's congenital.

"Now, take this Peter Siner and his disgraceful fight over a n.i.g.g.e.r wench. Would you expect an educated stud horse to pay no attention to a mare, sir? You can educate a stud till--"

"But hold on!" interrupted the old cavalryman. "I've known as gentlemanly stallions as--as anybody!"

The old attorney cleared his throat, momentarily taken aback at this failure of his metaphor. However he rallied with legal suppleness:

"You are talking about thoroughbreds, sir."

"I am, sir."

"Good G.o.d, Tomwit! you don't imagine I'm comparing a n.i.g.g.e.r to a thoroughbred, sir!"

On the street corners, or piled around on cotton-bales down on the wharf, the negro men of the village discussed the fight. It was for the most part a purely technical discussion of blows and counters and kicks, and of the strange fact that a college education failed to enable Siner utterly to annihilate his adversary. Jim Pink Staggs, a dapper gentleman of ebony blackness, of pin-stripe flannels and blue serge coat-- altogether a gentleman of many parts--sat on one of the bales and indolently watched an old black crone fishing from a ledge of rocks just a little way below the wharf-boat. Around Jim Pink lounged and sprawled black men and youths, stretching on the cotton-bales like cats in the sunshine.

Jim Pink was discussing Peter's education.

"I 'fo' Gawd kain't see no use goin' off lak dat an' den comin' back an'

lettin' a white man cheat you out'n yo' hide an' taller, an' lettin' a black man beat you up tull you has to 'kick him in the spivit. Ef a aidjucation does you any good a-tall, you'd be boun' to beat de white man at one en' uv de line, or de black man at de udder. Ef Peter ain't to be foun' at eider en', wha is he?"

"Um-m-m!" "Eh-h-h!" "You sho spoke a moufful, Jim Pink!" came an a.s.senting chorus from the bales.

Eventually such gossip died away and took another flurry when a report went abroad that Tump Pack was carrying a pistol and meant to shoot Peter on sight. Then this in turn ceased to be news and of human interest. It clung to Peter's mind longer than to any other person's in Hooker's Bend, and it presented to the brown man a certain problem in casuistry.

Should he accede to Tump Pack's possession of Cissie Dildine and give up seeing the girl? Such a course cut across all his fine-spun theory about women having free choice of their mates. However, the Harvard man could not advocate a socialization of courtship when he himself would be the first beneficiary. The prophet whose finger points selfward is d.a.m.ned.

Furthermore, all n.i.g.g.e.rtown would side with Tump Pack in such a controversy. It was no uncommon thing for the very negro women to fight over their beaux and husbands. As for any social theory changing this regime, in the first place the negroes couldn't understand the theory; in the second, it would have no effect if they could. Actions never grow out of theories; theories grow out of actions. A theory is a looking- gla.s.s that reflects the past and makes it look like the future, but the gla.s.s really hides the future, and when humanity comes to a turn in its course, there is always a smash-up, and a blind groping for the lost path.

Now, in regard to Cissie Dildine, Peter was not precisely afraid of Tump Pack, but he could not clear his mind of the fact that Tump had been presented with a medal by the Congress of the United States for killing four men. Good sense and a care for his reputation and his skin told Peter to abandon his theory of free courtship for the time being. This meant a renunciation of Cissie Dildine; but he told himself he renounced very little. He had no reason to think that Cissie cared a picayune about him.

Peter's work kept him indoors for a number of days following the encounter. He was reviewing some primary school work in order to pa.s.s a teacher's examination that would be held in Jonesboro, the county seat, in about three weeks.

To the uninitiated it may seem strange to behold a Harvard graduate stuck down day after day poring over a pile of dog-eared school-books-- third arithmetics, primary grammars, beginners' histories of Tennessee, of the United States, of England; physiology, hygiene. It may seem queer. But when it comes to standing a Wayne County teacher's examination, the specific answers to the specific questions on a dozen old examination slips are worth all the degrees Harvard ever did confer.

So, in his newspapered study, Peter Siner looked up long lists of questions, and attempted to memorize the answers. But the series of missteps he had made since returning to Hooker's Bend besieged his brain and drew his thoughts from his catechism. It seemed strange that in so short a time he should have wandered so far from the course he had set for himself. His career in n.i.g.g.e.rtown formed a record of slight mistakes, but they were not to be undone, and their combined force had swung him a long way from the course he had plotted for himself. There was no way to explain. Hooker's Bend would judge him by the sheer surface of his works. What he had meant to do, his dreams and altruisms, they would never surmise. That was the irony of the thing.

Then he thought of Cissie Dildine who did understand him. This thought might have been Cissie's cue to enter the stage of Peter's mind. Her oval, creamy face floated between Peter's eyes and the dog-eared primer.

He thought of Cissie wistfully, and of her lonely fight for good English, good manners, and good taste. There was a pathos about Cissie.

Peter got up from his chair and looked out at his high window into the early afternoon. He had been poring over primers for three days, stuffing the most heterogeneous facts. His head felt thick and slightly feverish. Through his window he saw the side of another negro cabin, but by looking at an angle eastward he could see a field yellow with corn, a valley, and, beyond, a hill wooded and glowing with the pageantry of autumn. He thought of Cissie Dildine again, of walking with her among the burning maples and the golden elms. He thought of the restfulness such a walk with Cissie would bring.