Flags in the Dust (25 page)

She said, “Come here,” and he went to her, and in the dusk she was again tragic and young and familiar, with a haunting sense of loss, and he knew the sad fecundity of the world, and time’s hopeful unillusion that fools itself. “I want to have your child, Horace,” she said, and then her own child came up the hall and stood diffidently in the door.

For a moment Belle was an animal awkward and mad with fear. She surged away from him in a mad spurning movement; her hands crashed on the keys as she controlled her instinctive violent escape that left in the dusk a mindless protective antagonism, pervading, in steady cumulate waves, directed at Horace as well.

“Come in, Titania,” Horace said.

The little girl stood diffidently in silhouette. Belle’s voice was sharp with relief. “Well, what do you want? Sit over there,” she hissed at Horace. “What do you want, Belle?” Horace drew away a little, but without rising.

“I’ve got a new story to tell you, soon,” he said. But little Belle stood yet, as though she had not heard, and her mother said:

“Go on and play, Belle. Why did you come in the house? It isn’t supper time, yet.”

“Everybody’s gone home,” she answered. “I haven’t got anybody to play with.”

“Go to the kitchen and talk to Rachel then,” Belle said. She struck the keys again, harshly. “You worry me to death, hanging
around the house.” The little girl stood for a moment longer; then she turned obediently and went away. “Sit over there,” Belle repeated. Horace resumed his chair and Belle played again, loudly and swiftly, with cold hysterical skill. Overhead Harry thumped again across the floor; they descended the stairs. Harry was still talking; the voices passed on toward the rear, ceased. Belle continued to play; still about him in the darkening room that blind protective antagonism like a muscular contraction that remains after the impulse of fright has died. Without turning her head she said:

“Are you going to stay for supper?”

He was not, he answered, waking suddenly. She did not rise with him, did not turn her head, and he let himself out the front door and into the late spring twilight, where was already a faint star above the windless trees. On the drive just without the garage Harry’s new car stood. At the moment he was doing something to the engine of it while the house-yard-stable boy held a patent trouble-lamp above the beetling crag of his head and his daughter and Rachel, holding tools or detached sections of the car’s vitals, leaned their intent dissimilar faces across his bent back and into the soft bluish glare of the light. Horace went on homeward. Twilight, evening, came swiftly. Before he reached the corner where he turned, the street lamps sputtered and failed, then glared above the intersections, beneath the arching trees.

“General William Booth has gotten a leprechaun on Uriah’s wife,” Horace told himself, and gravely presented the flowers he had brought, and received in return the starry incense of her flying eyes. Mrs Marders was among the group
of Belle’s more intimate familiars in this room, affable and brightly cold, a little detached and volubly easy; she admired little Belle’s gifts one by one with impeccable patience. Belle’s voice came from the adjoining room where the piano was bowered for the occasion by potted palms and banked pots and jars of bloom, and where yet more ladies were sibilantly crescendic with an occasional soberly clad male on the outer fringe of their colorful chattering like rocks dumbly imponderable about the cauldron where seethed an hysterical tideflux. These men spoke to one another from the sides of their mouths and, when addressed by the ladies, with bleak and swift affability, from the teeth outward. Harry’s bald bullet head moved among his guests, borne hither and yon upon the harsh uproar of his voice; presently, when the recital would have gotten underway and the ladies engaged, he would begin to lead the men one by one and on tiptoe from the room and up the back stairs to his apartments.

But now the guests stood and drifted and chattered, anticipatory and unceasing, and every minute or two Harry gravitated again to the dining room, on the table of which his daughter’s gifts and flowers were arrayed and beside which little Belle in her pale lilac dress stood in a shining-eyed and breathless ecstasy.

“Daddy’s gal,” Harry, in his tight, silver-gray gabardine suit and his bright tie with the diamond stud, chortled, putting his short thick hands on her; then together they examined the latest addition to the array of gifts with utter if dissimilar sincerity—little Belle with quiet and shining diffidence, her father stridently, tactlessly overloud. Harry was smoking his cigarettes steadily, scattering ash; he had receptacles of them open on every available flat surface throughout the lighted rooms. “How’s the boy?” he added, shaking Horace’s hand.

“Will you look at that sumptuous bouquet Horace has
brought your daughter,” Mrs Marders said. “Horace, it’s really a shame. She’d have appreciated a toy or a doll much more, wouldn’t you honey? Are you trying to make Belle jealous?”

Little Belle gave Horace her flying stars again. Harry squatted before her.

“Did Horace bring daddy’s gal some flowers?” he brayed. “Just look at the flowers Horace brought her.” He put his hands on her again. Mrs Marders said quickly:

“You’ll burn her dress with that cigarette, Harry.”

“Daddy’s gal dont care,” Harry answered. “Buy her a new dress tomorrow.” But little Belle freed herself, craning her soft brown head in alarm, trying to see the back of her frock, and then Belle entered in pink beneath a dark blue frothing of tulle, and the rich bloody auburn of her hair. Little Belle showed her Horace’s bouquet, and she knelt and fingered and patted little Belle’s hair, and smoothed her dress.

“Did you thank him?” she asked. “I know you didn’t.”

“Of course she did,” Horace interposed. “Just as you thank providence for breath every time you breathe.” Little Belle looked up at him with her grave ecstatic shining. “We think girls should always have flowers when they play music and dance,” he explained, gravely too. “Dont we?”

“Yes,” little Belle agreed breathlessly.

“Yes, sir,” Belle corrected fretfully. Patting and pulling at her daughter’s delicate wisp of dress, with its tiny embroidered flowers at the yoke. Belle kneeling in a soft swishing of silk, with her rich and smoldering unrepose. Harry stood with his squat, tightly-clothed body, looking at Horace with the friendly, blood-shot bewilderment of his eyes.

“Yes, sir,” little Belle piped obediently.

Belle rose, swishing again. “Come on, sister. It’s time to begin. And dont forget and start pulling at your clothes.”

——

The indiscriminate furniture—dining-room chairs, rockers, sofas and all—were ranged in semicircular rows facing the corner where the piano was placed. Beside the piano and above little Belle’s soft brown head and her little sheer frock and the tense, impotent dangling of her legs, the music teacher, a thin passionate spinster with cold thwarted eyes behind nose glasses, stood. The men clung stubbornly to the rear row of chairs, their sober decorum splotched sparsely among the cacophonous hues of the women’s dresses. With the exception of Harry, that is, who now sat with the light full on his bald crag. Just beyond him and between him and Mrs Marders, Horace could see Narcissa’s dark burnished head. Belle sat on the front row at the end, turned sideways in her chair. The other ladies were still now, temporarily, in a sort of sibilant vacuum of sound into which the tedious labored tinkling of little Belle’s playing fell like a fairy fountain.

The music tinkled and faltered, hesitated, corrected itself to the intent nodding of little Belle’s head and the strained meagre gestures of the teacher, tinkled monotonously and tunelessly on while the assembled guests sat in a sort of bland, waiting inattention; and Horace speculated on that persevering and senseless urge of parents (and of all adults) for making children a little ridiculous in their own eyes and in the eyes of other children. The clothes they make them wear, the stupid mature things they make them do. And he found himself wondering if to be cultured did not mean to be purged of all taste; civilized, to be robbed of all fineness of objective judgment regarding oneself. Then he remembered that little Belle also had been born a woman.

The music tinkled thinly, ceased; the teacher leaned forward with a passionate movement and removed the sheet from the rack, and the room swelled with a polite adulation of bored
palms. Horace too; and little Belle turned on the bench, with her flying eyes, and Horace grinned faintly at his own masculine vanity. Sympathy here, when she was answering one of the oldest compulsions of her sex, a compulsion that taste nor culture nor anything else would ever cause to appear ridiculous to her. Then the teacher spoke to her and she turned on the bench again, with her rapt laborious fingers and the brown, intent nodding of her head.

Belle sat sideways in her chair. Her head was bent and her hands lay idle upon her lap and she sat brooding and remote. Horace watched her, the line of her neck, the lustrous stillness of her arm; trying to project himself into that region of rich and smoldering immobility into which she had withdrawn for the while. But he could not; she did not seem to be aware of him at all; the corridors where he sought her were empty, and he moved quietly in his seat beneath the thin tinkling of the music and looked about at the other politely attentive heads and beyond them, in the doorway, Harry making significant covert signs in his direction. Harry jerked his thumb toward his mouth and moved his head meaningly, but Horace flipped his hand briefly in reply, without moving. When he looked doorward again Harry was gone.

Little Belle ceased again. When the clapping died the heavy thump-thump-thump of Harry’s heels sounded on the ceiling above. Ridiculous, like the innocent defenseless backside of a small boy caught delving into an apple barrel, and a few of the guests cast their eyes upward in polite astonishment. Belle raised her head sharply, with an indescribable gesture, then she looked at Horace with cold and blazing irritation, enveloping, savage, disdainful of who might see. The thumping ceased, became a cautious clumsy tipping, and Belle’s
anger faded, though her gaze was still full upon him. Little Belle played again and Horace looked away from the cold fixity of Belle’s gaze, a little uncomfortably, and so saw Harry and one of the men guests enter surreptitiously and seat themselves; he turned his head again. Beneath the heavy shadow of her hair Belle still watched him, and he shaped three words with his lips. But Belle’s mouth did not change its sullen repose, nor her eyes, and then he realized that she was not looking at him at all, perhaps had never been.

Later Belle herself went to the piano and played a trite saccharine waltz and little Belle danced to it with studied, meaningless gestures too thinly conceived and too airily executed to be quite laughable, and stood with her diffident shining among the smug palms. She would have danced again, but Belle rose from the piano, and the guests rose also with prompt unanimity and surrounded her in laudatory sibilance. Belle stood moodily beside her daughter in the center of it, and little Belle pleasurably. Horace rose also. Above the gabbling of the women he could hear Harry again overhead: thump-thump-thump, and he knew that Belle was also listening although she responded faultlessly to the shrill indistinguishable compliments of her guests. Beside little Belle the teacher stood, with her cold, sad eyes, proprietorial and deprecatory, touching little Belle’s hair with a meagre passionate hand.

Then they drifted doorward, with their shrill polite uproar. Little Belle slid from among them and came, a little drunk with all the furore and her central figuring in it, and took Horace’s hand. “What do you think was the best,” she asked. “When I played, or when I danced?”

“I think they both were,” he answered.

“I know. But what do you
think
was the best?”

“Well, I think the dancing was, because your mamma was playing for you.”

“So do I,” little Belle agreed. “They could see all of me when I was dancing, couldn’t they? When you are playing, they cant see but your back.”

“Yes,” Horace agreed. He moved toward the door, little Belle still clinging to his hand.

“I wish they wouldn’t go. Why do they have to go now? Cant you stay a while?”

“I must take Narcissa home. She cant go home by herself, you know.”

“Yes,” little Belle agreed. “Daddy could take her home in our car.”

“I expect I’d better do it. But I’ll be coming back soon.”

“Well, all right, then.” Little Belle sighed with weary contentment. “I certainly do like parties; I certainly do. I wish we had one every night.” The guests clotted at the door, evacuating with politely trailing phrases into the darkness. Belle stood responding to their recapitulations with smoldering patience. Narcissa stood slightly aside, waiting for him, and Harry was among them again, strident and affable.

“Daddy’s gal,” he said. “Did Horace see her playing the piano and dancing? Want to go up and take one before you leave?” he asked Horace in a jarring undertone.

“No, thanks. Narcissa’s waiting for me. Some other time.”

“Sure, sure,” Harry agreed, and Horace was aware of Belle beside him, speaking to little Belle, but when he turned his head she was moving away with her silken swishing and her heavy, faint scent. Harry was still talking. “How about a couple of sets tomorrow? Let’s get over early, before Belle’s gang comes, and get in a couple of fast ones, then let ’em have the court.”

“All right,” Horace agreed, as he always did to this arrangement, wondering as usual if that boy’s optimism of Harry’s really permitted him to believe that they could or would follow
it out, or if he had just said the phrase so many times that the juxtaposition of the words no longer had any meaning in his liquor-fuddled brain. Then Narcissa was beside him, and they were saying Goodnight, and the door closed upon little Belle, and Harry’s glazed squat dome and upon Belle’s smoldering and sullen rage. She had said no word to him all evening.

It was the evening of little Belle’s recital, the climacteric of her musical year. During the whole evening Belle had not looked at him, had said no word to him, even when, in the departing crush at the door and while Harry was trying to persuade him upstairs for a night-cap, he felt her beside him for an instant, smelled the heavy scent she used. But she said no word to him even then, and he put Harry aside at last and the door closed on little Belle and on Harry’s glazed dome, and Horace turned into the darkness and found that Narcissa hadn’t waited. She was halfway to the street. “If you’re going my way, I’ll walk along with you,” he called to her. She made no reply, neither did she slacken her pace nor increase it when he joined her.