Birthright Part 23

When Peter entered the library, old Captain Renfrew greeted him with morning wishes, thus sustaining the fiction that they had not seen each other before, that morning.

The old gentleman seemed pleased but somewhat excited over his new secretary. He moved some of his books aimlessly from one table to another, placed them in exact piles as if he were just about to plunge into heroic labor, and could not give time to such details once he had begun.

As he arranged his books just so, he cleared his throat.

"Now, Peter, we want to get down to this," he announced dynamically; "do this thing, shove this work out!" He started with tottery briskness around to his ma.n.u.script drawer, but veered off to the left to aline some magazines. "System, Peter, system. Without system one may well be hopeless of performing any great literary labor; but with system, the constant piling up of brick on brick, stone on stone--it's the way Rome was built, my boy."

Peter made a murmur supposed to acknowledge the correctness of this view.

Eventually the old Captain drew out his drawer of ma.n.u.script, stood fumbling with it uncertainly. Now and then he glanced at Peter, a genuine secretary who stood ready to help him in his undertaking. The old gentleman picked up some sheets of his ma.n.u.script, seemed about to read them aloud, but after a moment shook his head, and said, "No, we'll do that to-night," and restored them to their places. Finally he turned to his helper.

"Now, Peter," he explained, "in doing this work, I always write at night. It's quieter then,--less distraction. My mornings I spend downtown in conversation with my friends. If you should need me, Peter, you can walk down and find me in front of the livery-stable. I sit there for a while each morning."

The gravity with which he gave this schedule of his personal habits amused Peter, who bowed with a serious, "Very well, Captain."

"And in the meantime," pursued the old man, looking vaguely about the room, "you will do well to familiarize yourself with my library in order that you may be properly qualified for your secretarial labors."

Peter agreed again.

"And now if you will get my hat and coat, I will be off and let you go to work," concluded the Captain, with an air of continued urgency.

Peter became thoroughly amused at such an outcome of the old gentleman's headlong attack on his work,--a stroll down to the village to hold conversation with friends. The mulatto walked unsmilingly to a little closet where the Captain hung his things. He took down the old gentleman's tall hat, a gray greatcoat worn s.h.i.+ny about the shoulders and tail, and a finely carved walnut cane. Some reminiscence of the manners of butlers which Peter had seen in theaters caused him to swing the overcoat across his left arm and polish the thin nap of the old hat with his right sleeve. He presented it to his employer with a certain duplication of a butler's obsequiousness. He offered the overcoat to the old gentleman's arms with the same air. Then he held up the collar of the greatcoat with one hand and with the other reached under its skirts, and drew down the Captain's long day coat with little jerks, as if he were going through a ritual.

Peter grew more and more hilarious over his barber's manners. It was his contribution to the old gentleman's literary labors, and he was doing it beautifully, so he thought. He was just making some minute adjustments of the collar when, to his amazement, Captain Renfrew turned on him.

"d.a.m.n it, sir!" he flared out. "What do you think you are? I didn't engage you for a kowtowing valet in waiting, sir! I asked you, sir, to come under my roof as an intellectual co-worker, as one gentleman asks another, and here you are making these n.i.g.g.e.ry motions! They are disgusting! They are defiling! They are beneath the dignity of one gentleman to another, sir! What makes it more degrading, I perceive by your mannerism that you a.s.sume a specious servility, sir, as if you would flatter me by it!"

The old lawyer's face was white. His angry old eyes jerked Peter out of his slight mummery. The negro felt oddly like a grammar-school boy caught making faces behind his master's back. It shocked him into sincerer manners.

"Captain," he said with a certain stiffness, "I apologize for my mistake; but may I ask how you desire me to act?"

"Simply, naturally, sir," thundered the Captain, "as one alumnus of Harvard to another! It is quite proper for a young man, sir, to a.s.sist an old gentleman with his hat and coat, but without fripperies and genuflections and absurdities!"

The old man's hauteur touched some spring of resentment in Peter. He shook his head.

"No, Captain; our lack of sympathy goes deeper than manners. My position here is anomalous. For instance, I can talk to you sitting, I can drink with you standing, but I can't breakfast with you at all. I do that _in camera_, like a disgraceful divorce proceeding. It's precisely as I was treated coming down here South again; it's as I've been treated ever since I've been back; it's--" He paused abruptly and swallowed down the rancor that filled him. "No," he repeated in a different tone, "there is no earthly excuse for me to remain here, Captain, or to let you go on measuring out your indulgences to me. There is no way for us to get together or to work together--not this far South. Let me thank you for a night's entertainment and go."

Peter turned about, meaning to make an end of this queer adventure.

The old Captain watched him, and his pallor increased. He lifted an unsteady hand.

"No, no, Peter," he objected, "not so soon. This has been no trial, no fair trial. The little--little--er--details of our domestic life here, they will--er--arrange themselves, Peter. Gossip--talk, you know, we must avoid that." The old lawyer stood staring with strange eyes at his protege. "I--I'm interested in you, Peter. My actions may seem--odd, but--er--a negro boy going off and doing what you have done-- extraordinary. I--I have spoken to your mother, Caroline, about you often. In fact, Peter, I--I made some little advances in order that you might complete your studies. Now, now, don't thank me! It was purely impersonal. You seemed bright. I have often thought we gentle people of the South ought to do more to encourage our black folk--not--not as social equals--" Here the old gentleman made a wry mouth as if he had tasted salt.

"Stay here and look over the library," he broke off abruptly. "We can arrange some ground of--of common action, some--"

He settled the lapels of his great-coat with precision, addressed his palm to the k.n.o.b of his stick, and marched stiffly out of the library, around the piazza, and along the dismantled walk to the front gate.

Peter stood utterly astonished at this strange information. Suddenly he ran after the old lawyer, and rounded the turn of the piazza in time to see him walk stiffly down the shaded street with tremulous dignity. The old gentleman was much the same as usual, a little shakier, perhaps, his tall hat a little more polished, his s.h.i.+ny gray overcoat set a little more snugly at the collar.

CHAPTER X

The village of Hooker's Bend amuses itself mainly with questionable jests that range all the way from the slightly brackish to the hopelessly obscene. Now, in using this type of anecdote, the Hooker's- Benders must not be thought to design an attack upon the decencies of life; on the contrary, they are relying on the fact that their hearers have, in the depths of their beings, a profound reverence for the object of their sallies. And so, by taking advantage of the moral shock they produce and linking it to the idea of an absurdity, they convert the whole psychical reaction into an explosion of humor. Thus the ring of raconteurs telling blackguardly stories around the stoves in Hooker's Bend stores, are, in reality, exercising one another in the more delicate sentiments of life, and may very well be cla.s.sed as a round table of Sir Galahads, _sans peur et sans reproche_.

However, the best men weary in well doing, and for the last few days Hooker's Bend had switched from its intellectual staple of conversation to consider the comedy of Tump Pack's undoing. The incident held undeniably comic elements. For Tump to start out carrying a forty-four, meaning to blow a rival out of his path, and to wind up hard at work, picking cotton at nothing a day for a man whose offer of three dollars a day he had just refused, certainly held the makings of a farce.

On the heels of this came the news that Peter Siner meant to take advantage of Tump's arrest and marry Cissie Dildine. Old Parson Ranson was responsible for the spread of this last rumor. He had fumbled badly in his effort to hold Peter's secret. Not once, but many times, always guarded by a pledge of secrecy, had he revealed the approaching wedding.

When pressed for a date, the old negro said he was "not at lib'ty to tell."

Up to this point white criticism viewed the stage-setting of the black comedy with the impersonal interest of a box party. Some of the round table said they believed there would be a dead c.o.o.n or so before the sc.r.a.pe was over.

Dawson Bobbs, the ponderous constable, went to the trouble to telephone Mr. Cicero Throgmartin, for whom Tump was working, cautioning Throgmartin to make sure that Tump Pack was in the sleeping-shack every night, as he might get wind of the wedding and take a notion to bolt and stop it. "You know, you can't tell what a fool n.i.g.g.e.r'll do," finished Bobbs.

Throgmartin was mildly amused, promised the necessary precautions, and said:

"It looks like Peter has put one over on Tump, and maybe a college education does help a n.i.g.g.e.r some, after all."

The constable thought it was just luck.

"Well, I dunno," said Throgmartin, who was a philosopher, and inclined to view every matter from various angles. "Peter may of worked this out somehow."

"Have you heard what Henry Hooker done to Siner in the land deal?"

Throgmartin said he had.

"No, I don't mean _that_. I mean Henry's last wrinkle in garnisheeing old Ca'line's estate in his bank for the rest of the purchase money on the Dilihay place."

There was a pause.

"You don't mean it!"

"d.a.m.n 'f I don't."

The constable's sentence shook with suppressed mirth, and the next moment roars of laughter came over the telephone wire.

"Say, ain't he the bird!"

"He's the original early bird. I'd like to get a snap-shot of the worm that gets away from him."

Both men laughed heartily again.

"But, say," objected Throgmartin, who was something of a lawyer himself,--as, indeed, all Southern men are,--"I thought the Sons and Daughters of Benevolence owed Hooker, not Peter Siner, nor Ca'line's estate."

"Well, it _is_ the Sons and Daughters, but Ca'line was one of 'em, and they ain't no limited li'bility 'sociation. Henry can jump on anything any of 'em's got. Henry got the Persimmon to bring him a copy of their by-laws."