Flags in the Dust (23 page)

The meaning of peace; one of those instants in a man’s life, a neap tide in his affairs, when, as though with a premonition of disaster, the moment takes on a sort of fixed clarity in which his actions and desires stand boldly forth unshadowed
and rhythmic one with another like two steeds drawing a single chariot along a smooth empty road, and during which the I in him stands like a tranquil deciduated tree above the sere and ludicrous disasters of his days.

Narcissa had failed to call at the office for him and he walked home and changed to flannels and the blue jacket with his Oxford club insignia embroidered upon the breast pocket, and removed his racket from its press. In trees and flower beds spring was accomplishing itself more and more with the accumulating days, and he walked on with the sunset slanting into his hair, toward Belle’s. He strode on, chanting to himself, walking a little faster until the majestic monstrosity of the house came into view.

Someone piped thinly to him from beyond the adjoining fence; it was Belle’s eight year old daughter, her dress of delicate yellow a single note of a chord of other small colored garments engaged in the intense and grave preoccupations of little girls. Horace waved his racket at her and went on, turning into the drive. The gravel slipped with short sibilance beneath his rubber soles. He did not approach the entrance to the house but continued instead along the drive toward the rear, where already against the further sunshot green of old trees and flowering shrubs he saw a figure in white tautly antic with motion in a single overarching sweep. They were playing already, someone. Belle would be there, already ensconced,
Ahenobarbus’ vestal, proprietorial and inattentive, preeningly dictatorial; removed from the dust and the heat and the blood; disdainful and the principal actor in the piece. O thou grave myrtle shapes amid which petulant Death.

But Belle was the sort of watcher he preferred, engaged as she would be in that outwardly faultless immersion, in the unflagging theatrics of her own part in the picture, surrounding him as she would with that atmosphere of surreptitious domesticity. Belle didn’t play tennis herself: her legs were not good, and Belle knew it; but sat instead in a tea gown of delicate and irreproachable lines at a table advantageously placed and laden with books and magazines and the temporarily discarded impedimenta of her more Atalanta-esque sisters. There was usually a group around Belle’s chair—other young women or a young man or so inactive between sets, with an occasional older woman come to see just exactly what was going on or what Belle wore at the time; watching Belle’s pretty regal airs with the young men. “Like a moving picture,” Aunt Sally Wyatt said once, with cold and curious interest.

And presently Meloney would bring tea out and lay it on the table at Belle’s side. Between the two of them, Belle with her semblance of a peahen suave and preening and petulant upon clipped sward, before marble urns and formal balustrades, and Meloney in her starched cap and apron and her lean shining legs, they made a rite of the most casual gathering; lending a sort of stiffness to it which Meloney seemed to bring in on her tray and beneath which the calling ladies grew more and more reserved and coldly watchful and against which Belle flowered like a hot-house bloom, brilliant and petulant and perverse.

It had taken Belle some time to overcome Jefferson’s prejudice against a formal meal between dinner and supper and to educate the group in which she moved to tea as a function in itself and not as something to give invalids or as an adjunct to a party of some sort. But Horace had assisted her, unwittingly and without self-consciousness; and there had been a youth, son of a carpenter, of whom Belle had made a poet and sent to
New Orleans and who, being a conscientious objector, had narrowly escaped prison during the war and who now served in a reportorial capacity on a Texas newspaper, holding the position relinquished by a besotted young man who had enlisted in the Marine Corps early in ’17.

Bareheaded, in flannels and a blue jacket with his Oxford club insignia embroidered on the pocket and his racket under his arm, Horace passed on around the house and the court came into view with its two occupants in fluid violent action. Beneath an arcade of white pilasters and vine-hung beams Belle, surrounded by the fragile, harmonious impedimenta of the moment, was like a butterfly. Two sat with her, in bright relief against the dark foliage of a crepe-myrtle not yet in flower. The other woman (the third member of the group was a young girl in white and with a grave molasses bang and a tennis racket across her knees) spoke to him, and Belle greeted him with a sort of languid possessive desolation. Her hand was warm, prehensile, like mercury in his palm exploring softly with delicate bones and petulant scented flesh. Her eyes were like hothouse grapes and her mouth was redly mobile, rich with discontent; but waked now from its rouged repose, this was temporarily lost. She had lost Meloney, she told him.

“Meloney saw through your gentility,” Horace said. “You grew careless, probably. Your elegance is much inferior to Meloney’s. You surely didn’t expect to always deceive anyone who can lend as much rigid discomfort to the function of eating and drinking as Meloney could, did you? Or has she got married some more?”

“She’s gone in business,” Belle answered fretfully. “A beauty shop. And why, I cant for the life of me see. Those things never do last, here. Can you imagine Jefferson women supporting a beauty shop, with the exception of us three? Mrs
Marders and I might; I’m sure we need it, but what use has Frankie for one?”

“What seems curious to me,” the other woman said, “is where the money came from. People thought that perhaps you had given it to her, Belle.”

“Since when have I been a public benefactor?” Belle said coldly. Horace grinned faintly. Mrs Marders said:

“Now, Belle, we all know how kindhearted you are; dont be modest.”

“I said a public benefactor,” Belle repeated. Horace said quickly:

“Well, Harry would swap a handmaiden for an ox, any day. At least, he can save a lot of wear and tear on his cellar, not having to counteract your tea in a lot of casual masculine tummies. I suppose there’ll be no more tea out here, will there?” he added.

“Dont be silly,” Belle said.

Horace said: “I realise now that it is not tennis that I come here for, but for the incalculable amount of uncomfortable superiority I always feel when Meloney … serves me tea.… I saw your daughter as I came along.”

“She’s somewhere around, I suppose,” Belle agreed indifferently. “You haven’t had your hair cut yet,” she stated. “Why is it that men have no sense about barbers?” she said generally. The older woman watched Belle and Horace brightly, coldly across her two flaccid chins. The young girl sat quietly in her simple virginal white, her racket on her lap and one brown hand lying upon it like a sleeping tan puppy. She was watching Horace with sober interest but without rudeness, as children do. “They either wont go to the barber at all, or they insist on having their heads all gummed up with pomade and things,” Belle added.

“Horace is a poet,” the other woman said. Her flesh draped loosely from her cheek-bones like rich, slightly-soiled velvet; her eyes were like the eyes of an old turkey, predatory and unwinking; a little obscene. “Poets must be excused for what they do. You should remember that, Belle.” Horace bowed toward her.

“Your race never fails in tact, Belle,” he said. “Mrs Marders is one of the few people I know who give the law profession its true evaluation.”

“It’s like any other business, I suppose,” Belle said. “You’re late today. Why didn’t Narcissa come?”

“I mean, dubbing me a poet,” Horace explained. “The law, like poetry, is the final resort of the lame, the halt, the imbecile and the blind. I dare say Caesar invented the law business to protect himself against poets.”

“You’re so clever,” Belle said. The young girl spoke suddenly:

“Why do you bother about what men put on their hair, Miss Belle? Mr Mitchell’s bald.”

The other woman laughed, unctuously, steadily, watching them with her lidless unlaughing eyes. She watched Belle and Horace and still laughed steadily, brightly and cold. “ ‘Out of the mouths of babes——’ ” she said. The young girl glanced from one to another with her clear sober eyes. She rose.

“I guess I’ll see if I cant get a set now,” she said.

Horace moved also. “Let’s you and I——” he began. Without turning her head Belle touched him with her hand.

“Sit down, Frankie,” she commanded. “They haven’t finished the game yet. You shouldn’t laugh so much on an empty stomach,” she told Mrs Marders. “Do sit down, Horace.”

The girl stood yet with slim and awkward grace, holding her racket. She looked at Belle a moment, then she turned her face to the court again. Horace took the chair beyond Belle;
her hand dropped hidden into his, with that secret movement, then it grew passive; it was as though she had turned a current off somewhere. Like one entering a dark room in search of something, finding it and pressing the light off again.

“Dont you like poets?” Horace spoke across Belle’s body. The girl did not turn her head.

“They cant dance,” she answered. “I guess they are all right, though. They went to the war, the good ones did. There was one was a good tennis player, that got killed. I’ve seen his picture, but I dont remember his name.”

“Oh, dont start talking about the war, for heaven’s sake,” Belle said. Her hand stirred in Horace’s. “I had to listen to Harry for two years. Explaining why he couldn’t go. As if I cared whether he did or not.”

“He had a family to support,” Mrs Marders suggested brightly. Belle half reclined, her head against the chair-back, her hidden hand moving slowly in Horace’s, exploring, turning, ceaselessly like a separate volition curious but without warmth.

“Some of them were aviators,” the girl continued. She stood with one little unemphatic hip braced against the table, her racket clasped beneath her arm, turning the pages of a magazine. Then she closed the magazine and again she watched the two figures leanly antic upon the court. “I danced with one of those Sartoris boys once. I was too scared to know which one it was. I wasn’t anything but a baby, then.”

“Were they poets?” Horace asked. “I mean, the one that got back. I know the other one, the dead one, was.”

“He sure can drive that car of his,” she answered, still watching the players, her straight hair (hers was the first bobbed head in town) not brown not gold, her brief nose in profile, her brown still hands clasping her racket. Belle stirred and freed her hand.

“Do go on and play, you all,” she said. “You make me nervous, both of you.” Horace rose with alacrity.

“Come on, Frankie. Let’s you and I take ’em on for a set.”

The girl looked at him. “I’m not so hot,” she said soberly. “I hope you wont get mad.”

“Why? If we get beat?” They moved together toward the court where the two players were now exchanging sides. “Do you know what the finest sensation of all is?” Her straight brown head moved just at his shoulder. It’s her dress that makes her arms and hands so brown, he thought. Little. He could not remember her at all sixteen months back, when he had gone away. They grow up so quickly, though, after a certain age. Go away again and return, and find her with a baby, probably.

“Good music?” she suggested tentatively, after a time.

“No. It’s to finish a day and say to yourself: Here’s one day during which I have accomplished nothing and hurt no one and had a whale of a good time. How does it go? ‘Count that day lost whose low descending sun——’? Well, they’ve got it exactly backward.”

“I dont know. I learned it in school, I guess,” she answered indifferently. “But I dont remember it now. D’you reckon they’ll let me play? I’m not so hot,” she repeated.

“Of course they will,” Horace assured her. And soon they were aligned: the two players, the book-keeper in the local department store and a youth who had been recently expelled from the state university for a practical joke (he had removed the red lantern from the barrier about a street excavation and hung it above the door of the girls’ dormitory) against Horace and the girl. Horace was an exceptional player, electric and brilliant. One who knew tennis and who had patience and a cool head could have defeated him out of hand by letting him beat himself. But not these. The points see-sawed back and
forth, but usually Horace managed to retrieve the advantage with stroking or strategy so audacious as to obscure the faultiness of his tactics.

Meanwhile he could watch her; her taut earnestness, her unflagging determination not to let him down, her awkward virginal grace. From the back line he outguessed their opponents with detached and impersonal skill, keeping the point in abeyance and playing the ball so as to bring her young intent body into motion as he might pull a puppet’s strings. Hers was an awkward speed that cost them points, but from the base line Horace retrieved her errors when he could, pleasuring in the skimpy ballooning of her little dress moulded and dragged by her arms and legs, watching the taut revelations of her speeding body in a sort of ecstasy. Girlwhite and all thy little Oh. Not pink, no. For a moment I thought she’d no. Disgraceful, her mamma would call it. Or any other older woman. Belle’s are pink O muchly “Oaten reed above the lyre,” Horace chanted, catching the ball at his shoe-tops with a full swing, watching it duck viciously beyond the net. Oaten reed above the lyre. And Belle like a harped gesture, not sonorous. Piano, perhaps. Blended chords, anyway. Unchaste? Knowledgeable better. Knowingly wearied. Weariedly knowing. Yes, piano. Fugue. Fugue of discontent. O moon rotting waxed overlong too long

Last point. Game and set. She made it with savage awkwardness; and turned at the net and stood with lowered racket as he approached. Beneath the simple molasses of her hair she was perspiring a little. “I kept on letting ’em get my alley,” she explained. “You never bawled me out a single time. What ought I to do, to break myself of that?”

“You ought to run in a cheese-cloth shimmy on hills under a new moon,” Horace told her. “With chained ankles, of course. But a slack chain. No, not the moon; but in a dawn like pipes. Green and gold, and maybe a little pink. Would you risk
a little pink?” She watched him with grave curious eyes as he stood before her lean in his flannels and with his sick brilliant face and his wild hair. “No,” he corrected himself again. “On sand. Blanched sand, with dead ripples. Ghosts of dead motion waved into the sand. Do you know how cold the sea can be just before dawn, with a falling tide? Like lying in a dead world, upon the dead respirations of the earth. She’s too big to die all at once. Like elephants.…… How old are you?” Now all at once her eyes became secretive, and she looked away. “Now what?” he demanded. “What did you start to say then?”