Naturally, Peter knew of this extraordinary system of service in the South; nevertheless he was shocked at its implications.

"Captain," suggested Peter, "wouldn't you find it to your own interest to give old Rose a full cash payment for her services and allow her to buy her own things?"

The Captain dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand. "She's a n.i.g.g.e.r, Peter; you can't hire a n.i.g.g.e.r not to steal. Born in 'em. Then I'm not sure but what it would be compounding a felony, hiring a person not to steal; might be so construed. Well, now, there's the script. Read it carefully, my boy, and remember that in order to gain a certain _status quo_ certain antecedents are--are absolutely necessary, Peter. Without them my--my life would have been quite empty, Peter.

It's--it's very strange--amazing. You will understand as you read. I'll be back to dinner, so good-by." In the strangest agitation the old Captain walked out of the library. The last glimpse Peter had of him was his meager old figure silhouetted against the cold gray fog that filled the compound.

Neither the Captain's agitation nor his obvious desire that Peter should at once read the new ma.n.u.script really got past the threshold of the mulatto's consciousness. Peter's thoughts still hovered about old Rose, and from that point spread to the whole system of colored service in the South. For Rose's case was typical. The wage of cooks in small Southern villages is a pittance--and what they can steal. The tragedy of the mothers of a whole race working for their board and thievings came over Peter with a rising grimness. And there was no public sentiment against such practice. It was accepted everywhere as natural and inevitable. The negresses were never prosecuted; no effort was made to regain the stolen goods. The employers realized that what they paid would not keep soul and body together; that it was steal or perish.

It was a fantastic truth that for any colored girl to hire into domestic service in Hooker's Bend was more or less entering an apprenticeship in peculation. What she could steal was the major portion of her wage, if two such anomalous terms may be used in conjunction.

Yet, strange to say, the negro women of the village were quite honest in other matters. They paid their small debts. They took their mistresses'

pocket-books to market and brought back the correct change. And if a mistress grew too indignant about something they had stolen, they would bring it back and say: "Here is a new one. I'd rather buy you a new one than have you think I would take anything."

The whole system was the lees of slavery, and was surely the most demoralizing, the most grotesque method of hiring service in the whole civilized world. It was so absurd that its mere relation lapses into humor, that bane of black folk.

Such painful thoughts filled the gloomy library and hara.s.sed Peter in his copying. He took his work to the window and tried to concentrate upon it, but his mind kept playing away.

Indeed, it seemed to Peter that to sit in this old room and rewrite the wordy meanderings of the old gentleman's book was the very height of emptiness. How utterly futile, when all around him, on every hand, girls like Cissie Dildine were being indentured to corruption! And, as far as Peter knew, he was the only person in the South who saw it or felt it or cared anything at all about it.

When Cissie Dildine came to the surface of Peter's mind she remained there, whirling around and around in his chaotic thoughts. He began talking to her image, after a certain dramatic trick of his mind, and she began offering her environment as an excuse for what had come between them and estranged them. She stole, but she had been trained to steal. She was a thief, the victim of an immense immorality. The charm of Cissie, her queer, swift-working intuition, the candor of her confession, her voluptuousness--all came rushing down on Peter, hara.s.sing him with anger and love and desire. To copy any more script became impossible. He lost his place; he hardly knew what he was writing.

He flung aside the whole work, got to his feet with the imperative need of an athlete for the open. He started out of the room, but as an afterthought scribbled a nervous line, telling the Captain he might not be back for dinner. Then he found his hat and coat and walked briskly around the piazza to the front gate.

The trees and shrubs were dripping, but the fog had almost cleared away, leaving only a haze in the air. A pale, level line of it cut across the scarp of the Big Hill. The sun shone with a peculiar soft light through the vapors.

As Peter pa.s.sed out at the gate, the fancy came to him that he might very well be starting on his mission. It came with a sort of surprise.

He wondered how other men had set about reforms. With unpremeditation?

He wondered to whom Jesus of Nazareth preached his first sermon. The thought of that young Galilean, sensitive, compa.s.sionate, inexperienced, speaking to his first hearer, filled Peter with a strange trembling tenderness. He looked about the familiar street of Hooker's Bend, the old trees over the pavement, the shabby village houses, and it all held a strangeness when thus juxtaposed to the thought of Nazareth nineteen hundred years before.

The mulatto started down the street with his footsteps quickened by a sense of spiritual adventure.

CHAPTER XVI

On the corner, against the blank south wall of Hobbett's store, Peter Siner saw the usual crowd of negroes warming themselves in the soft sunshine. They were slapping one another, scuffling, making feints with knives or stones, all to an accompaniment of bragging, profanity, and loud laughter. Their behavior was precisely that of adolescent white boys of fifteen or sixteen years of age.

Jim Pink Staggs was furnishing much amus.e.m.e.nt with an impromptu sleight- of-hand exhibition. The black audience cl.u.s.tered around Jim Pink in his pinstripe trousers and blue-serge coat. They exhibited not the least curiosity as to the mechanics of the tricks, but asked for more and still more, with the nave delight of children in the mysterious.

Peter Siner walked down the street with his Messianic impulse strong upon him. He was in that stage of feeling toward his people where a man's emotions take the color of religion. Now, as he approached the crowd of negroes, he wondered what he could say, how he could transfer to them the ideas and the emotion that lifted up his own heart.

As he drew nearer, his concern mounted to anxiety. Indeed, what could he say? How could he present so grave a message? He was right among them now. One of the negroes jostled him by striking around his body at another negro. Peter stopped. His heart beat, and he had a queer sensation of being operated by some power outside himself. Next moment he heard himself saying in fairly normal tones:

"Fellows, do you think we ought to be idling on the street corners like this? We ought to be at work, don't you think?"

The horse-play stopped at this amazing sentiment.

"Whuffo, Peter?" asked a voice.

"Because the whole object of our race nowadays is to gain the respect of other races, and more particularly our own self-respect. We haven't it now. The only way to get it is to work, work, work."

"Ef you feel lak you'd ought to go to wuck," suggested one astonished hearer, "you done got my p'mission, black boy, to hit yo' natchel gait to de fust job in sight."

Peter was hardly less surprised than his hearers at what he was saying.

He paid no attention to the interruption.

"Fellows, it's the only way our colored people can get on and make the most out of life. Persistent labor is the very breath of the soul, men; it--it is." Here Peter caught an intimation of the whole flow of energy through the universe, focusing in man and being transformed into mental and moral values. And it suddenly occurred to him that the real worth of any people was their efficiency in giving this flow of force moral and spiritual forms. That is the end of man; that is what is prefigured when a baby's hand reaches for the sun. But Peter considered his audience, and his thought stammered on his tongue. The Persimmon, with his protruding, half-asleep eyes, was saying:

"I don' know, Peter, as I 's so partic'lar 'bout makin' de mos' out'n dis worl'. You know de Bible say--hit say,"--here the Persimmon's voice dropped a tone lower, in unconscious imitation of negro preachers,--"la- ay not up yo' treasure on uth, wha moss do corrup', an' thieves break th'ugh _an'_ steal."

Came a general nodding and agreement of soft, blurry voices.

"'At sho whut it say, black man!"

"Sho do!"

"Lawd G.o.d loves a n.i.g.g.e.r on a street corner same as He do a millionaire in a six-cylinder, Peter."

"Sho do, black man; but He's jes about de onlies' thing on uth 'at do."

"Well, I don' know," came a troubled rejoinder. "Thaiuh 's de debbil, ketchin' mo' n.i.g.g.e.rs nowadays dan he do white men, I 'fo' Gawd b'liebes."

"Well, dat's because dey _is_ so many mo' n.i.g.g.e.rs dan dey is white folks," put in a philosopher.

"Whut you say 'bout dat, Brudder Peter?" inquired the Persimmon, seriously. None of this discussion was either derision or burlesque.

None of the crowd had the slightest feeling that these questions were not just as practical and important as the suggestion that they all go to work.

When Peter realized how their ignorant and undisciplined thoughts flowed off into absurdities, and that they were entirely unaware of it, it brought a great depression to his heart. He held up a hand with an earnestness that caught their vagrant attention.

"Listen!" he pleaded. "Can't you see how much there is for us black folks to do, and what little we have done?"

"Sho is a lot to do; we admits dat," said Bluegum Frakes. "But whut's de use doin' hit ef we kin manage to shy roun' some o' dat wuck an' keep on libin' anyhow, specially wid wages so high?"

The question stopped Peter. Neither his own thoughts, nor any book that he had ever read nor any lecture that he had heard ever attempted to explain the enormous creative urge which is felt by every n.o.ble mind, and which, indeed, is shared to some extent by every human creature. Put to it like that, Siner concocted a sort of allegory, telling of a negro who was shiftless in the summer and suffered want in the winter, and applied it to the present high wage and to the low wage that was coming; but in his heart Peter knew such utilitarianism was not the true reason at all. Men do not weave tapestries to warm themselves, or build temples to keep the rain away.

The brown man pa.s.sed on around the corner, out of the faint warmth of the sunshine and away from the empty and endless arguments which his coming had provoked among the negroes.

The futile ending of his first adventure surprised Peter. He walked uncertainly up the business street of the village, hardly knowing where to turn next.

Cold weather had driven the merchants indoors, and the thoroughfare was quite deserted except for a few hogs rooting among the refuse heaps piled in front of the stores. It was not a pleasant sight, and it repelled Peter all the more because he was accustomed to the antiseptic look of a Northern city. He walked up to the third door from the corner, when a buzz of voices brought him to a standstill and finally persuaded him inside.

At the back end of a badly lighted store a circle of white men and boys had formed around an old-fashioned, egg-shaped stove. Near by, on some meal-bags, sat two negroes, one of whom wore a broad grin, the other, a funny, sheepish look.

The white men were teasing the latter negro about having gone to jail for selling a mortgaged cow. The men went about their fun-making leisurely, knowing quite well the negro could not get angry or make any retort or leave the store, all of these methods of self-defense being ruled out by custom.

"You must have forgot your cow was mortgaged, Bob."