Flags in the Dust (5 page)

“No,” the other said quickly, with grave concern. “You dont believe he would have done that? No, no, he wouldn’t have. Horace wouldn’t have done that. He never does anything without telling me about it first. He would have written: I know he would. You really dont think that sounds like Horace, do you? A thing like that?”

“Hmph,” Miss Jenny said through her high-bridged Norman nose. “An innocent like Horace straying with that trusting air of his among all those man-starved European women? He wouldn’t know it himself, until it was too late; especially in a foreign language. I bet in every town he was in over seven days his landlady or somebody was keeping his supper on the stove when he was late, or holding sugar out on the other men to sweeten his coffee with. Some men are born to always have some woman making a doormat of herself for him, just as some men are born cuckolded.…… How old are you?”

“I’m still twenty-six, Miss Jenny,” the younger woman replied equably. Simon unhitched the horses and he stood now beside the carriage in his Miss Jenny attitude. It differed from the bank one; there was now in it a gallant and protective deference. Miss Jenny examined the still serenity of the other’s face.

“Why dont you get married, and let that baby look after himself for a while? Mark my words, it wont be six months before some other woman will be falling all over herself for the privilege of keeping his feet dry, and he wont even miss you.”

“I promised mother,” the other replied quietly and without offense.…… “I dont see why he couldn’t have sent an intelligible message.”

“Well.…” Miss Jenny turned to her carriage. “Maybe it’s only an orphan, after all,” she said with comfortless reassurance.

“I’ll know soon, anyway,” the other agreed, and she crossed to a small car at the curb and opened the door. Miss Jenny got in her carriage, and Simon mounted and gathered up the reins.

“Let me know when you hear again,” she called as the carriage moved forward. “Drive out and get some more flowers when you want ’em.”

“Thank you. Goodbye.”

“All right, Simon.” The carriage moved on again, and again Simon withheld his news until they were out of town.

“Mist’ Bayard done got home,” he remarked, in his former conversational tone.

“Where is he?” Miss Jenny demanded immediately.

“He aint come out to de place yit,” Simon answered. “I ’speck he went to de graveyard.”

“Nonsense,” Miss Jenny snapped. “No Sartoris ever goes to the cemetery but once.… Does Colonel know he’s home?”

“Yessum, I tole him, but he dont ack like he believed I wuz tellin’ him de troof.”

“You mean, nobody’s seen him but you?”

“I aint seed ’im neither,” Simon disclaimed. “Section han’ seed ’im jump off de train and tole me——”

“You damn fool nigger!” Miss Jenny stormed. “And you went and blurted a fool thing like that to Bayard? Haven’t you got any more sense than that?”

“Section han’ seed ’im,” Simon repeated stubbornly. “I reckon he knowed Mist’ Bayard when he seed ’im.”

“Well, where is he, then?”

“He mought have gone out to de graveyard,” Simon suggested.

“Drive on!”

Miss Jenny found her nephew with two bird-dogs in his office. The room was lined with bookcases containing rows of heavy legal tomes bound in dun calf and emanating an atmosphere of dusty and undisturbed meditation, and a miscellany of fiction of the historical-romantic school (all Dumas was there, and the steady progression of the volumes now constituted Bayard’s entire reading, and one volume lay always on the night-table beside his bed) and a collection of indiscriminate objects—small packets of seed, old rusted spurs and bits and harness buckles, brochures on animal and vegetable diseases, ornate tobacco containers which people had given him on various occasions and anniversaries and which he had never used, inexplicable bits of rock and desiccated roots and grain pods—all collected one at a time and for reasons which had long since escaped his memory, yet preserved just the same. The room contained an enormous closet with a padlocked door, and a big table littered with yet more casual objects, and a locked roll-top desk (keys and locks were an
obsession with him) and a sofa and three big leather chairs. This room was always referred to as the office, and Bayard now sat here with his hat on and still in his riding boots, transferring bourbon whisky from a small rotund keg to a silver stoppered decanter while the two dogs watched him with majestic gravity.

One of the dogs was quite old and nearly blind. It spent most of the day lying in the sun in the back yard, or during the hot summer days, in the cool dusty obscurity beneath the kitchen. But toward the middle of the afternoon it went around to the front and waited there quietly and gravely until the carriage came up the drive, and when Bayard had descended and entered the house it returned to the back and waited again until Isom led the mare up and Bayard came out and mounted. Then together they spent the afternoon going quietly and unhurriedly about the meadows and fields and woods in their seasonal mutations—the man on his horse and the ticked setter gravely beside him, while the descending evening of their lives drew toward its peaceful close upon the kind land that had bred them both. The young dog was not yet two years old; his
net was too hasty for the sedateness of their society overlong, and though at times he set forth with them or came quartering up, splashed and eager, from somewhere to join them in midfield, it was not for long and soon he must dash away with his tongue flapping and the tense delicate feathering of his tail in pursuit of the maddening elusive smells with which the world surrounded him and tempted him from every thicket and copse and ravine.

Bayard’s boots were wet to the tops and the soles were caked with mud, and he bent with intense preoccupation above his keg and bottle under the sober curiosity of the dogs. The keg was propped bung-upward in a second chair and he was siphoning the rich brown liquor delicately into the
decanter by means of a rubber tube. Miss Jenny entered with her black bonnet still perched on the exact top of her trim white head, and the dogs looked up at her, the older with grave dignity, the younger one more quickly, tapping his tail on the floor with fawning diffidence. But Bayard did not raise his head. Miss Jenny closed the door and stared coldly at his boots.

“Your feet are wet,” she stated. Still he didn’t look up, but held the tube delicately in the bottle-neck, while the liquor mounted steadily in the decanter. At times his deafness was very convenient, more convenient than actual, perhaps; but who could know certainly? “You go up stairs and get those boots off,” Miss Jenny commanded, raising her voice. “I’ll fill the decanter.”

But within the walled serene tower of his deafness his imperturbability did not falter until the decanter was full and he pinched the tube and raised it and drained it back into the keg. The older dog had not moved, but the younger one had retreated beyond Bayard, where it lay motionless and alert, its head on its crossed forepaws, watching Miss Jenny with one melting unwinking eye. Bayard drew the tube from the keg and looked at her for the first time. “What did you say?”

But Miss Jenny returned to the door and opened it and shouted into the hall, eliciting an alarmed response from the kitchen, followed presently by Simon in the flesh. “Go up and get Colonel’s slippers,” she directed. When she turned into the room again neither Bayard nor the keg was visible, but from the open closet door there protruded the young dog’s interested hind quarters and the tense feathering of his barometric tail; then Bayard thrust the dog out of the closet with his foot and emerged himself and locked the door behind him.

“Has Simon come in, yet?” he asked.

“He’s coming now,” she answered. “I just called him. Sit down and get those wet boots off.” At that moment Simon
entered, with the slippers, and Bayard sat obediently and Simon knelt and drew his boots off under Miss Jenny’s martinet eye. “Are his socks dry?” she asked.

“No’m, dey aint wet,” Simon answered. But she bent and felt them herself.

“Here,” Bayard said testily, but Miss Jenny ran her hand over both his feet with brusque imperturbability.

“Precious little fault of his if they aint,” she said across the topless wall of his deafness. “And then you have to come along with that fool yarn of yours.”

“Section han’ seed ’im,” Simon repeated stubbornly, thrusting the slippers onto Bayard’s feet. “I aint never said I seed him.” He looked up and rubbed his hands on his thighs.

Bayard stamped into the slippers. “Bring the toddy fixings, Simon.” Then to his aunt, in a tone which he contrived to make casual: “Simon says Bayard got off the train this afternoon.” But Miss Jenny was storming at Simon again.

“Come back here and get these boots and set ’em behind the stove,” she said. Simon returned and sidled swiftly to the hearth and gathered up the boots. “And take these dogs out of here, too,” she added. “Thank the Lord he hasn’t thought about bringing his horse in with him.” Immediately the old dog came to his feet, and followed by the younger one’s diffident alacrity, departed with that same assumed deliberation with which both Bayard and Simon obeyed Miss Jenny’s brisk implacability.

“Simon says——” Bayard repeated.

“Simon says fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny snapped. “Have you lived with Simon sixty years without learning that he dont know the truth when he sees it?” And she followed Simon from the room and on to the kitchen, and while Simon’s tall yellow daughter bent over her biscuit-board and Simon filled a glass pitcher with fresh water and sliced lemons and set them and a
sugar bowl and two tall glasses on a tray, Miss Jenny stood in the doorway and curled Simon’s grizzled remaining hair to tighter kinks yet. She had a fine command of language at all times, but when her ire was aroused she soared without effort to sublime heights. Hers was a forceful clarity and a colorful simplicity and a bold use of metaphor that Demosthenes would have envied and which even mules comprehended and of whose intent the most obtuse persons remained not long in doubt; and beneath it Simon’s head bobbed lower and lower and the fine assumption of detached preoccupation moulted like feathers from about him, until he caught up the tray and ducked from the room. Miss Jenny’s voice followed him, descending easily with a sweeping comprehensiveness that included a warning and a suggestion for future conduct for Simon and Elnora and all their descendants, actual and problematical, for some years.

“And the next time,” she concluded, “you or any section hand or brakeman or delivery boy either sees or hears anything you think will be of interest to Colonel, you tell me about it first: I’ll do all the telling after that.” She gave Elnora another glare for good measure and returned to the office, where her nephew was stirring sugar and water carefully in the two glasses.

Simon in a white jacket officiated as butler—doubled in brass, you might say, only it was not brass, but silver so fine and soft that some of the spoons were worn now almost to paper thinness where fingers in their generations had held them; silver which Simon’s grandfather Joby had buried on a time beneath the ammoniac barn floor while Simon, aged three in a single filthy garment, had looked on with a child’s grave interest in the curious game.

An effluvium of his primary calling clung about him
always, however, even when he was swept and garnished for church and a little shapeless in a discarded Prince Albert coat of Bayard’s; and his every advent into the dining room with dishes brought with him, and the easy attitudes into which he fell near the sideboard while answering Miss Jenny’s abrupt questions or while pursuing some fragmentary conversation which he and Bayard had been engaged in earlier in the day, disseminated, and his exits left behind him a faint nostalgia of the stables. But tonight he brought dishes in and set them down and scuttled immediately back to the kitchen: Simon realized that again he had talked too much.

Miss Jenny with a shawl of white wool about her shoulders against the evening’s coolness, was doing the talking tonight, immersing herself and her nephew in a wealth of trivialities—petty doings and sayings and gossip—a behavior which was not like Miss Jenny at all. She had opinions, and a pithy, savagely humorous way of stating them, but it was very seldom that she descended to gossip. Meanwhile Bayard had shut himself up in that walled tower of his deafness and raised the drawbridge and clashed the portcullis to, where you never knew whether he heard you or no, while his corporeal self ate its supper steadily. Presently they had done and Miss Jenny rang the little silver bell at her hand and Simon opened the pantry door and received again the cold broadside of her displeasure, and shut the door and lurked behind it until they had left the room.

Bayard lit his cigar in the office and Miss Jenny followed him there and drew her chair up to the table beneath the lamp and opened the daily Memphis newspaper. She enjoyed humanity in its more colorful mutations, preferring lively romance to the most impeccable of dun fact, so she took in the more lurid afternoon paper even though it was yesterday’s when it reached her, and read with cold avidity accounts of arson and murder and violent dissolution and adultery; in good
time and soon the American scene was to furnish her with diversion in the form of bootleggers’ wars, but this was not yet. Her nephew sat without the mellow downward pool of the lamp, with his feet braced against the corner of the hearth from which his boot-soles and the boot-soles of John Sartoris before him had long since worn the varnish away, puffing his cigar. He was not reading, and at intervals Miss Jenny glanced above her glasses and across the top of the paper toward him. Then she read again, and there was no sound in the room save the sporadic rustling of the page.

After a time he rose, with one of his characteristic plunging movements, and she watched him as he crossed the room and passed through the door and banged it to behind him. She read on for a while longer, but her attention had followed the heavy tramp of his feet up the hall, and when this ceased she rose and laid the paper aside and followed him to the front door.

The moon had gotten up beyond the dark eastern wall of the hills and it lay without emphasis upon the valley, mounting like a child’s balloon behind the oaks and locusts along the drive. Bayard sat with his feet on the veranda rail, in the moonlight. His cigar glowed at spaced intervals, and a shrill monotone of crickets rose from the immediate grass, and further away, from among the trees, a fairy-like piping of young frogs like endless silver small bubbles rising, and a thin sourceless odor of locust drifted up intangible as fading tobacco-wraiths, and from the rear of the house, up the dark hall, Elnora’s voice floated in meaningless minor suspense.