Flags in the Dust (26 page)

“Why is it,” he began, “that grown people will go to so much trouble to make children do ridiculous things, do you suppose? Belle had a house full of people she doesn’t care anything about and most of whom dont approve of her, and kept little Belle up three hours past her bedtime; and the result is Harry’s about half tight, and Belle is in a bad humor, and little Belle is too excited to go to sleep, and you and I wish we were home and are sorry we didn’t stay there.”

“Why do you go there, then?” Narcissa asked. Horace was suddenly stilled. They walked on through the darkness, toward the next street light. Against it branches hung like black coral in a yellow sea.

“Oh,” Horace said. Then: “I saw that old cat talking with you.”

“Why do you call Mrs Marders an old cat? Because she told me something that concerns me and that everybody else seems to know already?”

“So that’s who told you, is it? I wondered.……” He slid his arm within her unresponsive one. “Dear old Narcy.” They passed through the dappled shadows beneath the light, went on into darkness again.

“Is it true?” she asked.

“You forget that lying is a struggle for survival,” he said. “Little puny man’s way of dragging circumstance about to fit his preconception of himself as a figure in the world. Revenge on the sinister gods.”

“Is it true?” she persisted. They walked on, arm in arm, she gravely insistent and waiting; he shaping and discarding phrases in his mind, finding time to be amused at his own fantastic impotence in the presence of her constancy.

“People dont usually lie about things that dont concern them,” he answered wearily. “They are impervious to the world, even if they aren’t to life. Not when the actuality is so much more diverting than their imaginings could be,” he added. She freed her arm with grave finality.

“Narcy——”

“Dont,” she said. “Dont call me that.” The next corner, beneath the next light, was theirs; they would turn there. Above the arched canyon of the street the sinister gods stared down with pale, unwinking eyes. Horace thrust his hands into his jacket, and for a space he was stilled again while his fingers learned the unfamiliar object they had found in his pocket. Then he drew it forth: a sheet of heavy notepaper, folded twice and impregnated with a fading heavy scent. A familiar scent, yet baffling for the moment, like a face watching him from an arras. He knew the face would emerge in a moment, but as he held the note in his fingers and sought the face through the
corridors of his present distraction, his sister spoke suddenly and hard at his side.

“You’ve got the smell of her all over you. Oh, Horry, she’s dirty!”

“I know,” he answered unhappily, and the face emerged clearly, and he was suddenly empty and cold and sad. “I know.” It was like a road stretching on through darkness, into nothingness and so away; a road lined with black motionless trees O thou grave myrtle shapes amid which Death. A road along which he and Narcissa walked like two children drawn apart one from the other to opposite sides of it; strangers, yet not daring to separate and go in opposite ways, while the sinister gods watched them with cold unwinking eyes. And somewhere, everywhere, behind and before and about them pervading, the dark warm cave of Belle’s rich discontent and the tiger-reek of it.

But the world was opening out before him fearsome and sad and richly moribund, as though he were again an adolescent, and filled with shadowy shapes of dread and of delight not to be denied: he must go on, though the other footsteps sounded fainter and fainter in the darkness behind him and then not at all. Perhaps they had ceased, or turned into a byway.

This byway led her back to Miss Jenny. It was now well into June, and the scent of Miss Jenny’s transplanted jasmine drifted steadily into the house and filled it with constant cumulate waves like a fading resonance of viols. The earlier flowers were gone, and the birds had finished eating the strawberries and now sat about the fig bushes all day, waiting for them to ripen; zinnia and delphinium bloomed without any assistance from Isom who, since Caspey had more or less returned to normalcy
and laying-by time was yet a while away, might be found on the shady side of the privet hedge along the garden fence, trimming the leaves one by one from a single twig with a pair of mule shears until Miss Jenny returned to the house; whereupon he retreated himself and lay on the creek-bank for the rest of the afternoon, his hat over his eyes and a cane fishing pole propped between his toes. Old Simon pottered querulously about the place. His linen duster and tophat gathered chaff and dust on the nail in the harness room and the horses waxed fat and lazy and insolent in the pasture. The duster and hat came down from the nail and the horses were harnessed to the carriage but once a week, now—on Sundays, to drive in to town to church. Miss Jenny said she was too far along to jeopardize salvation by driving to church at fifty miles an hour; that she had as many sins as her ordinary behavior could take care of, particularly as she had old Bayard’s soul to get into heaven somehow, also, what with him and young Bayard tearing around the country every afternoon at the imminent risk of their necks. About young Bayard’s soul Miss Jenny did not alarm herself at all: he had no soul.

Meanwhile he rode about the farm and harried the negro tenants in his cold fashion, and in two dollar khaki breeches and a pair of field boots that had cost fourteen guineas he tinkered with farming machinery and with the tractor he had persuaded old Bayard to buy: for the time being he had become almost civilized again. He went to town only occasionally now, and often on horseback, and all in all his days had become so usefully innocuous that both his aunt and his grandfather were growing a little nervously anticipatory.

“Mark my words,” Miss Jenny told Narcissa on the day she drove out again. “He’s storing up devilment that’s going to burst loose all at once, someday, and then there’ll be hell to
pay. Lord knows what it’ll be—maybe he and Isom will take his car and that tractor and hold a steeple chase with ’em.… What did you come out for? Got another letter?”

“I’ve got several more,” Narcissa answered lightly. “I’m saving them until I get enough for a book, then I’ll bring them all out for you to read.” Miss Jenny sat opposite her, erect as a crack guardsman, with that cold briskness of hers that caused agents and strangers to stumble through their errands with premonitions of failure ere they began. The guest sat motionless, her limp straw hat on her knees. “I just came to see you,” she added, and for a moment her face held such grave and still despair that Miss Jenny sat more erect yet and stared at her guest with her piercing gray eyes.

“Why, what is it, child? Did the man walk into your house?”

“No, no.” The look was gone, but still Miss Jenny watched her with those keen old eyes that seemed to see so much more than you thought—or wished. “Shall I play a while? It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Well,” Miss Jenny agreed, “if you want to.”

There was dust on the piano; Narcissa opened it with a fine gesture. “If you’ll let me get a cloth——”

“Here, lemme dust it,” Miss Jenny said, and she caught up her skirt by the hem and mopped the keyboard violently. “There, that’ll do.” Then she drew her chair from behind the instrument and seated herself. She still watched the other’s profile with speculation and a little curiosity, but presently the old tunes stirred her memory again, and in a while her eyes softened and the other and the trouble that had shown momentarily in her face, were lost in Miss Jenny’s own vanquished and abiding dead days, and it was some time before she realized that Narcissa was weeping quietly while she played.

Miss Jenny leaned forward and touched her arm. “Now,
you tell me what it is,” she commanded. And Narcissa told her in her grave contralto, still weeping quietly.

“Hmph,” Miss Jenny said. “That’s to be expected of a man that hasn’t any more to do than Horace. I dont see why you are so upset over it.”

“But that woman,” Narcissa wailed suddenly, like a little girl, burying her face in her hands. “She’s so dirty!”

Miss Jenny dug a man’s handkerchief from the pocket of her skirt and gave it to the other:

“What do you mean?” she asked. “Dont she wash often enough?”

“Not that way. I m-mean she’s—she’s——” Narcissa turned suddenly and laid her head on the piano.

“Oh,” Miss Jenny said. “All women are, if that’s what you mean.” She sat stiffly indomitable, contemplating the other’s shrinking shoulders. “Hmph,” she said again. “Horace has spent so much time being educated that he never has learned anything.…… Why didn’t you break it up in time? Didn’t you see it coming?”

The other wept more quietly now. She sat up and dried her eyes on Miss Jenny’s handkerchief. “It started before he went away. Dont you remember?”

“That’s so. I do sort of remember a lot of women’s gabble. Who told you about it, anyway? Horace?”

“Mrs Marders did. And then Horace did. But I never thought that he’d——I never thought——” again her head dropped to the piano, hidden in her arms. “I wouldn’t have treated Horace that way,” she wailed.

“Sarah Marders, was it? I might have known.…… I admire strong character, even if it is bad,” Miss Jenny stated. “Well, crying wont help any.” She rose briskly. “We’ll think what to do about it. Only I’d let him go ahead: it’ll do him good if she’ll just turn around and make a doormat of him.……
Too bad Harry hasn’t got spunk enough to.… But I reckon he’ll be glad; I know I would——There, there,” she said, at the other’s movement of alarm. “I dont reckon Harry’ll hurt him. Dry your face, now. You better go to the bathroom and fix up. Bayard’ll be coming in soon, and you dont want him to see you’ve been crying, you know.” Narcissa glanced swiftly at the door and dabbed at her face with Miss Jenny’s handkerchief.

At times the dark lifted, the black trees were no longer sinister, and then Horace and Narcissa walked the road in sunlight, as of old. Then he would seek her through the house and cross the drive and descend the lawn in the sunny afternoon to where she sat in the white dresses he loved beneath the oak into which a mockingbird came each afternoon and sang, bringing her the result of his latest venture in glass-blowing. He had five now, in different colors and all nearly perfect, and each of them had a name. And as he finished them and before they were scarce cooled, he must bring them across the lawn to where she sat with a book or with a startled caller perhaps, in his stained dishevelled clothes and his sooty hands in which the vase lay demure and fragile as a bubble, and with his face blackened too with smoke and a little mad, passionate and fine and austere.

But then the dark would descend once more, and beyond the black and motionless trees Belle’s sultry imminence was like a presence, like the odor of death. And then he and Narcissa were strangers again, tugging and straining at the shackles of custom and old affection that bound them with slipping bonds.

And then they were no longer even side by side. At times he called back to her through the darkness, making no sound and receiving no reply; at times he hovered distractedly like a dark bird between the two of them. But at last he merged with
himself, fused in the fatalism of his nature, and set his face steadily up the road, looking not back again. And then the footsteps behind him ceased.

For a time the earth held him in a hiatus that might have been called contentment. He was up at sunrise, planting things in the ground and watching them grow and tending them; he cursed and harried niggers and mules into motion and kept them there, and put the grist mill into running shape and taught Caspey to drive the tractor, and came in at mealtimes and at night smelling of machine oil and of stables and of the earth and went to bed with grateful muscles and with the sober rhythms of the earth in his body, and so to sleep. But he still waked at times in the peaceful darkness of his room and without previous warning, tense and sweating with old terror. Then, momentarily, the world was laid away and he was a trapped beast in the high blue, mad for life, trapped in the very cunning fabric that had betrayed him who had dared chance too much, and he thought again if, when the bullet found you, you could only crash upward, burst; anything but earth. Not death, no: it was the crash you had to live through so many times before you struck that filled your throat with vomit.

But his days were filled, at least, and he discovered pride again. Nowadays he drove the car into town to fetch his grandfather from habit alone, and though he still considered forty five miles an hour merely cruising speed, he no longer took cold and fiendish pleasure in turning curves on two wheels or in detaching mules from wagons by striking the whiffle-trees with his bumper in passing. Old Bayard still insisted on riding
with him when he must ride, but with freer breath; and once he aired to Miss Jenny his growing belief that at last young Bayard had outworn his seeking for violent destruction.

Miss Jenny, being a true optimist—that is, expecting the worst at all times and so being daily agreeably surprised—promptly disillusioned him. Meanwhile she made young Bayard drink plenty of milk and otherwise superintended his diet and hours in her martinettish way, and at times she entered his room at night and sat for a while beside the bed where he slept.

Nevertheless, young Bayard improved in his ways. Without being aware of the progress of it, he had become submerged in a monotony of days, had been snared by a rhythm of activities repeated and repeated until his muscles grew so familiar with them as to get his body through the days without assistance from him at all. He had been so neatly tricked by earth, that ancient Delilah, that he was not aware that his locks were shorn, was not aware that Miss Jenny and old Bayard were wondering how long it would be before they grew out again. He needs a wife, was Miss Jenny’s thought. Then maybe he’ll stay sheared. “A young person to worry with him,” she said to herself. “Bayard’s too old, and I’ve got too much to do, to worry with the long devil.”

He saw Narcissa about the house now and then, sometimes at the table these days, and he still felt her shrinking and her distaste, and at times Miss Jenny sat watching the two of them with a sort of speculation and an exasperation with their seeming obliviousness of one another. He treats her like a dog would treat a cut-glass pitcher, and she looks at him like a cut-glass pitcher would look at a dog, she told herself.