Peter Siner's thoughts lifted him with the tremendous buoyancy of inspiration. He swung out of his chair and began tramping his dark room. The skin of his scalp tickled as if a ghost had risen before him. The nerves in his thighs and back vibrated. He felt light, and tingled with energy.
Unaware of what he was doing, he set about lighting the gasolene-lamp. He worked with nervous quickness, as if he were in a great hurry. Presently a brilliant light flooded the room. It turned the gray illumination of the windows to blackness.
Joy enveloped Peter. His own future developed under his eyes with the same swift clairvoyance that marked his vision of the ills of his country. He saw himself remedying those ills. He would go about showing white men and black men the simple truth, the spiritual necessity for justice and fairness. It was not a question of social equality; it was a question of clearing a road for the development of Southern life. He would show white men that to weaken, to debase, to dehumanize the negro, inflicted a more terrible wound on the South than would any strength the black man might develop. He would show black men that to hate the whites, constantly to suspect, constantly to pilfer from them, only riveted heavier shackles on their limbs.
It was all so clear and so simple! The white South must humanize the black not for the sake of the negro, but for the sake of itself. No one could resist logic so fundamental.
Peter's heart sang with the solemn joy of a man who had found his work. All through his youth he had felt blind yearnings and gropings for he knew not what. It had driven him with endless travail out of Niggertown, through school and college, and back to Niggertown,—this untiring Hound of Heaven. But at last he had reached his work. He, Peter Siner, a mulatto, with the blood of both white and black in his veins, would come as an evangel of liberty to both white and black. The brown man's eyes grew moist from Joy. His body seemed possessed of tremendous energy.
As he paced his room there came into the glory of Peter's thoughts the memory of the Arkwright boy as he sat in the cedar glade brooding on the fallen needles Peter recalled the hobbledehoy's disjointed words as he wrestled with the moral and physical problems of adolescence. Peter recalled his impulse to sit down by young Sam Arkwright, and, as best he might, give him some clue to the critical and feverish period through which he was passing.
He had not done so, but Peter remembered the instance down to the very desperation in the face of the brooding youngster. And it seemed to Peter that this rejected impulse had been a sign that he was destined to be an evangel to the whites as well as to the blacks.
The joy of Peter's mission bore him aloft on vast wings. His room seemed to fall away from him, and he was moving about his country, releasing the two races from their bonds of suspicion and cruelty.
Slowly the old manor formed about Peter again, and he perceived that a tapping on the door had summoned him back. He walked to the door with his heart full of kindness for old Rose. She was bringing him his supper. He felt as if he could take the old woman in his arms, and out of the mere hugeness of his love sweeten her bitter life. The mulatto opened the door as eagerly as if he were admitting some long-desired friend; but when the shutter swung back, the old crone and her salver were not there. All he could discern in the darkness were the white pillars marking the night into panels. There was no light in the outer kitchen. The whole manor was silent.