Flags in the Dust (13 page)

“That Loosh Peabody is as big a fogy as old Will Falls,” she said. “Old people just fret me to death. You wait: I’ll bring him right back here, and we’ll finish this business.” Dr Alford held the door open for her and she sailed in a stiff silk-clad rage
from the room and followed her nephew across the corridor and through the scarred door with its rusty lock, and into a room resembling a miniature cyclonic devastation mellowed peacefully over with dust ancient and undisturbed.

“You, Loosh Peabody,” Miss Jenny said.

“Sit down, Jenny,” Dr Peabody told her, “and be quiet. Unfasten your shirt, Bayard.”

“What?” Bayard said belligerently. The other thrust him into a chair.

“Want to see your chest,” he explained. He crossed to an ancient rolltop desk and rummaged through the dusty litter upon it. There was litter and dust everywhere in the huge room. Its four windows gave upon the square, but the elms and sycamores ranged along the sides of the square shaded these first floor offices, so that light entered them but tempered, like light beneath water. In the corners of the ceiling were spider webs thick and heavy as Spanish moss and dingy as old lace; and the once-white walls were an even and unemphatic drab save for a paler rectangle here and there where an outdated calendar had hung and been removed. Besides the desk the room contained three or four miscellaneous chairs in various stages of decrepitude, a rusty stove in a sawdust filled box, and a leather sofa holding mutely amid its broken springs the outline of Dr Peabody’s recumbent shape; beside it and slowly gathering successive layers of dust, was a stack of lurid paper covered nickel novels. This was Dr Peabody’s library, and on this sofa he passed his office hours, reading them over and over. Other books there were none.

But the waste basket beside the desk and the desk itself and the mantel above the trash-filled fireplace, and the windowledges too were cluttered with circular mail matter and mail order catalogues and government bulletins of all kinds. In one corner, on an upended packing-box, sat a water cooler of
stained oxidized glass; in another corner leaned a clump of cane fishing poles warping slowly of their own weight, and on every horizontal surface rested a collection of objects not to be found outside of a second-hand store—old garments, bottles, a kerosene lamp, a wooden box of tins of axle grease, lacking one, a clock in the shape of a bland china morning-glory supported by four garlanded maidens who had suffered sundry astonishing anatomical mishaps, and here and there among their dusty indiscrimination various instruments pertaining to the occupant’s profession. It was one of these that Dr Peabody sought now, in the littered desk on which sat a single photograph in a wooden frame, and though Miss Jenny said again, “You, Loosh Peabody, you listen to me,” he continued to seek it with bland and unhurried equanimity.

“You fasten your clothes and we’ll go back to that doctor,” Miss Jenny said to her nephew. “Neither you nor I can waste any more time with a doddering old fool.”

“Sit down, Jenny,” Dr Peabody repeated, and he drew out a drawer and removed from it a box of cigars and a handful of faded artificial trout flies and a soiled collar and lastly a stethe-scope, then he tumbled the other things back into the drawer and shut it with his knee.

Miss Jenny sat trim and outraged, fuming while he listened to Bayard’s heart.

“Well,” she snapped, “does it tell you how to take that wart off his face? Will Falls didn’t need any telephone to find that out.”

“It tells more than that,” Dr Peabody answered. “It tells how Bayard’ll get rid of all his troubles, if he keeps on riding in that hellion’s automobile.”

“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said. “Bayard’s a good driver. I never rode with a better one.”

“It’ll take more’n a good driver to keep this—” he tapped
Bayard’s chest with his blunt finger—“goin’, time that boy whirls that thing around another curve or two like I’ve seen him do.”

“Did you ever hear of a Sartoris dying from a natural cause, like anybody else?” Miss Jenny demanded. “Dont you know that heart aint going to take Bayard off before his time? You get up from there, and come on with me,” she added to her nephew. Bayard buttoned his shirt, and Dr Peabody sat on the sofa and watched him quietly.

“Bayard,” he said suddenly, “why dont you stay out of that damn thing?”

“What?”

“If you dont keep out of that car, you aint goin’ to need me nor Will Falls, nor that boy in yonder with all his hand-boiled razors, neither.”

“What business is it of yours?” Bayard demanded. “By God, cant I break my neck in peace if I want to?” He rose. He was trembling, fumbling at his waistcoat buttons, and Miss Jenny rose also and made to help him, but he put her roughly aside. Dr Peabody sat quietly, thumping his fat fingers on one fat knee. “I have already outlived my time,” Bayard continued more mildly. “I am the first of my name to see sixty years that I know of. I reckon Old Marster is keeping me for a reliable witness to the extinction of it.”

“Now,” Miss Jenny said icily, “you’ve made your speech, and Loosh Peabody has wasted the morning for you, so I reckon we can leave now and let Loosh go out and doctor mules for a while, and you can sit around the rest of the day, being a Sartoris and feeling sorry for yourself. Good morning, Loosh.”

“Make him let that place alone, Jenny,” Dr Peabody said.

“Aint you and Will Falls going to cure it for him?”

“You keep him from letting Will Falls put anything on it,” Dr Peabody repeated equably. “It’s all right. Just let it alone.”

“We’re going to a doctor, that’s what we’re going to do,” Miss Jenny replied. “Come on here.”

When the door had closed he sat motionless and heard them quarrelling beyond it. Then the sound of their voices moved on down the corridor toward the stairs, and still quarrelling loudly and on Bayard’s part with profane emphasis, the voices died away. Then Dr Peabody lay back on the sofa shaped already to the bulk of him, and with random deliberation he reached a nickel thriller blindly from the stack at the head of the couch.

As they neared the bank Narcissa Benbow came along from the opposite direction, and they met at the door, where he made her a ponderous compliment on her appearance while she stood in her pale dress and shouted her grave voice into his deafness. Then he took his tilted chair, and Miss Jenny followed her into the bank and to the window. There was no one behind the grille at the moment save the book-keeper. He looked at them briefly and covertly across his shoulder, then slid from his stool and crossed to the window, but without raising his eyes again.

He took Narcissa’s check, and while she listened to Miss Jenny’s recapitulation of Bayard’s and Loosh Peabody’s stubborn masculine stupidity, she remarked the reddish hair which clothed his arms down to the second joints of his fingers; and remarked with a faint yet distinct distaste, and a little curiosity, since it was not particularly warm, the fact that his hands and arms were beaded with perspiration.

Then she made her eyes blank again and took the notes which he pushed under the grille to her and opened her bag.
From its blue satin maw the corner of an envelope and some of its superscription peeped suddenly, but she crumpled it quickly from sight and put the money in and closed the bag. They turned away, Miss Jenny still talking, and she paused at the door again, clothed in her still aura of quietness, while Bayard twitted her heavily on imaginary affairs of the heart which furnished the sole theme of conversation between them, shouting serenely at him in return. Then she went on, surrounded by tranquillity like a visible presence or an odor or a sound.

As long as she was in sight, the book-keeper stood at the window. His head was bent and his hand made a series of neat, meaningless figures on the pad beneath it. Then she went on and passed from sight. He moved, and in doing so he found that the pad had adhered to his damp wrist, so that when he removed his arm it came also, then its own weight freed it and it fell to the floor.

He finished the forenoon stooped on his high stool at his high desk beneath the green-shaded light, penning his neat figures into ledgers and writing words into them in the flowing spencerian hand he had been taught in a Memphis business college. At times he slid from the stool and crossed to the window with his covert evasive eyes and served a client, then returned to his stool and picked up his pen. The cashier, a rotund man with bristling hair and lapping jowls like a Berkshire hog, returned presently, accompanied by a director, who followed him inside the grille. They ordered coca-colas from a neighboring drug store by telephone and stood talking until the refreshment arrived by negro boy. Snopes had been included and he descended again and took his glass. The other two sipped theirs; he spooned the ice from his into a spittoon and emptied it at a draught and replaced the glass on the tray
and spoke a general and ignored thanks in his sober country idiom and returned to his desk.

Noon came. Old Bayard rose crashing from his tilted chair and stalked back to his office, where he would eat his frugal cold lunch and then sleep for an hour, and banged the door behind him. The cashier took his hat and departed also: for an hour Snopes would have the bank to himself. Outside the square lay motionless beneath noon; the dinnerward exodus of lawyers and merchants and clerks did not disturb its atmosphere of abiding and timeless fixation; in the elms surrounding the courthouse no leaf stirred in the May sunlight. Across the bank windows an occasional shadow passed, but none turned into the door, and presently the square was motionless as a theatre drop.

Snopes drew a sheet of paper from a drawer and laid it beneath the light and wrote slowly upon it, pausing at intervals, drawing his pen through a sentence or a word, writing again. Someone entered; without looking up he slid the paper beneath a ledger, crossed to the window and served the customer, returned and wrote again. The clock on the wall ticked into the silence and into the slow, mouse-like scratching of the pen. The pen ceased at last, but the clock ticked on like a measured dropping of small shot.

He re-read the first draught, slowly. Then he drew out a second sheet and made a careful copy. When this was done he re-read it also, comparing the two; then he folded the copy again and again until it was a small square thickness, and stowed it away in the fob-pocket of his trousers. The original he carried across to the cuspidor, and holding it above the receptacle he struck a match to it and held it in his fingers until the final moment. Then he dropped it into the spittoon and when it was completely consumed, he crushed the charred thing to
powder. Quarter to one. He returned to his stool and opened his ledgers again.

At one the cashier with a toothpick appeared at the door talking to someone, then he entered and went to old Bayard’s office and opened the door. “One oclock, Colonel,” he shouted into the room, and old Bayard’s heels thumped heavily on the floor. As Snopes took his hat and emerged from the grille old Bayard stalked forth again and tramped on ahead and took the tilted chair in the doorway.

There is in Jefferson a boarding house known as the Beard hotel. It is a rectangular frame building with a double veranda, just off the square, and it is conducted theoretically by a countryman, but in reality by his wife. Beard is a mild, bleached man of indeterminate age and of less than medium size, dressed always in a collarless shirt and a black evil pipe. He also owns the grist mill near the square, and he may be found either at the mill, or on the outskirts of the checker-game in the courthouse yard, or sitting in his stocking feet on the veranda of his hostelry. He is supposed to suffer from some obscure ailment puzzling to physicians, which prevents him exerting himself physically. His wife is a woman in a soiled apron, with straggling, damp grayish hair and an air of spent but indomitable capability. They have one son, a pale, quiet boy of twelve or so, who is always on the monthly honor roll at school; he may be seen on spring mornings schoolward bound with a bouquet of flowers. His rating among his contemporaries is not high.

Men only patronize the Beard hotel. Itinerant horse- and cattle-traders; countrymen in town overnight during court or the holiday season or arrested perhaps by inclement weather, stop there; and juries during court week——twelve good men and true marching in or out in column of twos, or aligned in chairs and spitting across the veranda rail with solemn and awesome decorum; and two of the town young bloods keep a
room there, in which it is rumored dice and cards progress Sundays and drinking is done. But no women. If a skirt (other than Mrs Beard’s gray apron) so much as flashes in the vicinity of its celibate portals, the city fathers investigate immediately, and woe to the peripatetic Semiramis if she be run to earth. Here, in company with a number of other bachelors—clerks, mechanics and such—the book-keeper Snopes lives.

And here he repaired when the bank day was finished. The afternoon was a replica of the morning. Then at three oclock the green shades were drawn upon door and windows, and Snopes and the cashier went about striking a daily balance. At 3:30 young Bayard arrived in his car and old Bayard stalked forth and got in it and was driven away. Presently thereafter the janitor, an ancient, practically incapacitated negro called Doctor Jones, came in and doddered futilely with a broom. By 4:30 he was done, and the cashier locked the vault and switched on the light above it, and he and the book-keeper emerged and locked the front door, and the cashier shook it experimentally.

After the bank closed that afternoon Snopes crossed the square and entered a street and approached a square frame building with a double veranda, from which the mournful cacophony of a cheap talking-machine came upon the afternoon. He entered. The music came from the room to the right and as he passed the door he saw a man in a collarless shirt sitting in a chair with his sock feet on another chair, smoking a pipe, the evil reek of which followed him down the hall. The hall smelled of damp, harsh soap, and the linoleum carpet gleamed, still wet. He followed it and approached a sound of steady, savage activity, and came upon a woman in a shapeless gray garment, who ceased mopping and looked at him across her gray shoulder, sweeping her lank hair from her brow with a reddened forearm.