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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.
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.
Peter's prolonged silence aroused certain suspicions in the old negress. She glanced at her son out of the tail of her eyes. "Cissie Dildine is Tump Pack's gal," she stated defensively, with the jealousy all mothers feel toward all sons. A diversion in the shouts of the children up the mean street and a sudden furious barking of dogs drew Peter from the discussion.
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.
He would let them remain, in the newspapered room, until all crumbled into uniform philosophic dust, and the teachings of Aristotle blew about Niggertown. Then, as he thought of traveling North, the vision of the honeymoon he had just planned revived his numb brain into a dismal aching. He looked back through the dusk at the Dildine roof. It stood black against an opalescent sky.
"I heard you were going to marry a negress here in town called Cissie Dildine." A question was audible in the silence that followed this statement. The obscure emotion that charged all the old man's queries affected Peter. "I am not, Captain," he declared earnestly; "that's settled." "Oh you say it's settled," picked up the old lawyer, delicately. "Yes." "Then you had thought of it?"
He felt as if he had come squarely against some blank stone wall that no amount of talking could budge. The black man would have to change his psychology or remain where he was, a creature of poverty, hovels, and dirt; but amid such surroundings he could not change his psychology. The point of these unhappy conclusions somehow turned against Cissie Dildine.
"Yes, sir." The negro's tone and attitude reminded the Captain that the supper gong would soon sound and they would best separate at once. "It it's about Cissie Dildine," the old lawyer hurried on. Peter nodded slightly. "Yes, you mentioned that before." The old man lifted a thin hand as if to touch Peter's arm, but he did not. A sort of desperation seized him.
For some reason Peter felt that he should assume Tump's place as Cissie Dildine's husband and protector. Had Tump lived, Peter might have gone North in peace, if not in happiness. Now such a journey, without Cissie, had become impossible. He had a feeling that it would not be right. As for the disgrace of marrying such a woman as Cissie Dildine, Peter slowly gave that idea up.
He tried to speak at an ordinary tempo, but his words kept edging on faster and faster: "Tump, I'm not going to marry Cissie Dildine." "I knows you ain't, Peter." "I mean, if you let me alone, I didn't mean to." "I ain't goin' to let you alone." "Tump, we had already decided not to marry."
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