Flags in the Dust

ONE

1

Old man Falls roared: “Cunnel was settin’ thar in a cheer, his sock feet propped on the po’ch railin’, smokin’ this hyer very pipe. Old Louvinia was settin’ on the steps, shellin’ a bowl of peas fer supper. And a feller was glad to git even peas sometimes, in them days. And you was settin’ back agin’ the post. They wa’nt nobody else thar ‘cep’ yo’ aunt, the one ‘fo’ Miss Jenny come. Cunnel had sont them two gals to Memphis to yo’ gran’pappy when he fust went away. You was ‘bout half-grown, I reckon. How old was you then, Bayard?”

“Fourteen,” old Bayard answered.

“Hey?”

“Fourteen,” Bayard shouted. “Do I have to tell you that every time you tell me this damn story?”

“And thar you all was a-settin’,” old man Falls continued, unruffled, “when they turned in at the gate and come trottin’ up the carriage drive.

“Old Louvinia drapped the bowl of peas and let out one squawk, but Cunnel shet her up and tole her to run and git his boots and pistols and have ‘em ready at the back do’, and you lit out fer the barn to saddle that stallion. And when them Yankees rid up and stopped—they stopped right whar that flower bed is now—they wa’nt nobody on the po’ch but Cunnel, a-settin’ thar like he never even heard tell of no Yankees.

“The Yankees they set thar on the hosses, talkin’ ‘mongst theyselves if this was the right house or not, and Cunnel settin’ thar with his sock feet on the railin’, gawkin’ at ‘em like a hillbilly. The Yankee officer he tole one man to ride back to the barn and look for that ‘ere stallion, then he says to Cunnel:

“ ‘Say, Johnny, whar do the rebel, John Sartoris, live?’

“ ‘Lives down the road a piece,’ Cunnel says, not battin’ a eye even’. ‘Bout two mile,’ he says. ‘But you won’t find ‘im now. He’s away fightin’ the Yanks agin.’

“ ‘Well, I reckon you better come and show us the way, anyhow,’ the Yankee officer says.

“So Cunnel he got up slow and tole ‘em to let ‘im git his shoes and walkin’ stick, and limped into the house, leavin’ ‘em a-settin’ thar waitin’.

“Soon’s he was out of sight he run. Old Louvinia was waitin’ at the back do’ with his coat and boots and pistols and a snack of cawn bread. That ‘ere other Yankee had rid into the barn, and Cunnel taken the things from Louvinia and wropped ‘em up in the coat and started acrost the back yard like he was jest takin’ a walk. ‘Bout that time the Yankee come to the barn door.

“ They ain’t no stock hyer a-tall,’ the Yank says.

“ ‘I reckon not,’ Cunnel says. ‘Cap’m says fer you to come on back,’ he says, goin’ on. He could feel that ‘ere Yank a-watchin’ ‘im, lookin’ right ‘twixt his shoulder blades, whar the bullet would hit. Cunnel says that was the hardest thing he ever done in his life, walkin’ on thar acrost that lot with his back to’ads that Yankee without breakin’ into a run. He was aimin’ to’ads the corner of the barn, whar he could git the house between ‘em, and Cunnel says hit seemed like he’d been a-walkin’ a year without gettin’ no closer and not darin’ to look back. Cunnel says he wasn’t even thinkin’ of nothin’ ‘cep’ he was glad the gals wa’nt at home. He says he never give a thought to yo’ aunt back thar in the house, because he says she was a full-blood Sartoris and she was a match fer any dozen Yankees.

“Then the Yank hollered at him, but Cunnel kep’ right on, not lookin’ back nor nothin’. Then the Yank hollered agin and Cunnel says he could hyear the hoss movin’ and he decided hit was time to stir his shanks. He made the corner of the barn jest as the Yank shot the fust time, and by the time the Yank got to the corner, he was in the hawg-lot, a-tearin’ through the jimson weeds to’ads the creek whar you was waitin’ with the stallion, hid in the willers.

“And thar you was a-standin’, holdin’ the hoss and that ‘ere Yankee patrol yellin’ up behind, until Cunnel got his boots on. And then he tole you to tell yo’ aunt he wouldn’t be home fer supper.”

As usual old man Falls had brought John Sartoris into the room with him. Freed as he was of time, he was a far more definite presence in the room than the two of them cemented by deafness to a dead time and drawn thin by the slow attenuation of days. He seemed to stand above them, all around them, with his bearded, hawklike face and the bold glamor of his dream.

Old Bayard sat with his feet braced against the side of the fireplace, holding the pipe in his hand. The bowl was ornately carved and it was charred with much usage, and on the bit were the prints of his father’s teeth.

“What’re you giving it to me for, after all this time?” he said.

“Well, I reckon I’ve kep’ it long as Cunnel aimed fer me to,” old man Falls answered. “A po’ house ain’t no place fer anything of his’n, Bayard,” he added. He sat bent forward, elbows on knees, chewing his tobacco for a while.

“Not fer a pipe of his’n,” he said. “Hit ‘ud be different ef ‘twas him, hisself now. Wouldn’t no place be a po’ house whar he was at; But that ‘ere thing that belonged to him, hit ‘ud be takin’ a advantage of him after he’s gone.” Old man Falls chewed his tobacco for a while. “I’m goin’ on ninety-fo’ year old, Bayard,” he said.

He spat neatly into the fireplace and drew the back of his hand across his month.

“A thing he toted in his pocket and got enjoyment outen, in them days. Hit’d be different, I reckon, while we was a-buildin’ the railroad. He said often enough in them days we was all goin’ to be in the po’ house by Saturday night. Or cemetery, mo’ likely, him ridin’ up and down the track with a saddle-bag full of money night and day, keepin’ jest one cross-tie ahead of the po’ house, like he said. That ‘us when hit changed. When he had to start killin’ folks. Them two carpet-baggers stirrin’ up niggers to vote, that he walked right into the room whar they was a-settin’ behind a table, with they pistols layin’ on the table, and that robber and that other feller he kilt, all with that same dang der’nger. When a feller has to start killin’ folks, he ‘most always has to keep on killin’ ‘em. And when he does, he’s already dead hisself.”

It showed on his brow, the dark shadow of fatality and doom, that night when he sat beneath the candles in his dining room and turned a wine glass in his fingers while he talked to his son. The railroad was finished, and today he had been elected to the legislature after a hard and bitter fight, and on his brow lay the shadow of his doom and a little weariness.

“And so,” he said, “Redlaw’ll kill me tomorrow, for I shall be unarmed. I’m tired of killing men...Pass the wine. Bayard.”

After old man Falls had gathered up his small parcels and gone old Bayard sat for some time, the pipe in his hand, rubbing the bowl slowly with his thumb. But presently John Sartoris too had departed; withdrawn rather, to that place where the peaceful dead contemplate their frustrated days, and old Bayard dropped his feet to the floor and rose and thrust the pipe into his pocket and took a cigar from the humidor on the mantel. As he struck the match the door behind him opened and a man wearing a green eye-shade entered and approached.

“Simon’s here, Colonel,” he said in an inflectionless voice.

“What?” Old Bayard turned his head, the cigar between his teeth and the match in his cupped hands.

“Simon’s come,” the other shouted flatly.

“Oh. All right” Old Bayard flung the match into the grate and thrust the cigar into his breast pocket. He took his black felt hat from the desk and followed the other and stalked through the lobby of the bank and emerged onto the street, where Simon in a linen duster and an ancient tophat held the matched geldings at the curb.

There was a hitching-post there, which old Bayard retained with a testy disregard of industrial progress, but Simon never used it. Until the door opened and Bayard emerged from behind the drawn green shades, Simon sat on the seat with the reins in his left hand and the thong of the whip caught smartly back in his right and usually the unvarying and seemingly incombustible fragment of a cigar in his mouth, talking to the horses in a steady, lover-like flow. Simon spoiled horses. He admired Sartorises and he had for them a warmly protective tenderness, but he loved horses, and beneath his hands the sorriest beast bloomed and acquired comeliness like a .caressed woman, temperament like an opera star.

Bayard crossed to the carriage with that stiff erectness of his which, as a countryman once remarked, was so straight as to almost meet itself walking along the street. One or two passers and a merchant or so in his shop door saluted him with a sort of florid servility; and behind him the shade on one window drew aside upon the. disembodied face of the man in the green eyeshade. The book-keeper was a hillman of indeterminate age, a silent man who performed his duties with tedious slow care and who watched Bayard constantly and covertly all the while he was in view.

Nor did Simon dismount even then. With his race’s fine feeling for potential theatrics he drew himself up and arranged the limp folds of the duster, communicating by some means the histrionic moment to the horses so that they too flicked their glittering coats and tossed their leashed heads, and into Simon’s wizened black face there came an expression indescribably majestical as he touched his hat brim with his whiphand. Bayard got in the carriage and Simon clucked to the horses, and the shade fell before the book-keeper’s face, and the bystanders, halted to admire the momentary drama of the departure, fell behind.

There was something different in Simon’s air today, however; in the very shape of his back and the angle of his hat: he appeared to be bursting with something momentous and ill-contained. But he withheld it for the time being, and at a dashing, restrained pace he drove among the tethered wagons about the square and swung into a broad street where what Bayard called paupers sped back and forth in automobiles, and withheld it until the town was behind them and they trotted on across burgeoning countryside cluttered still with gasoline-propelled paupers but at greater intervals, and his employer had settled back into that drowsing peace which the rhythmic clopping of the horses and the familiar changeful monotony of the land always gave him. Then Simon slowed to a more sedate pace and turned his head.

Simon’s voice was not particularly robust nor resonant, yet somehow he could talk to Bayard without difficulty. Others must shout in order to penetrate that wall of deafness beyond which Bayard lived; yet Simon could and did hold long, rambling conversations with him in that monotonous, rather high singsong of his, particularly while in the carriage, the vibration of which helped Bayard’s hearing a little.

“Mist’ Bayard done got home,” Simon remarked in a conversational tone.

Bayard returned from his region of drowsy abstraction and sat perfectly and furiously still while his heart went on, a little too fast and a little too lightly, cursing his grandson for a furious moment; sat so still that Simon looked back and found him gazing quietly out across the land. Simon raised his voice a little.

“He got offen de two o’clock train,” he continued. “Jumped off de wrong side and lit out th’ough de woods. Section hand seed ‘im. Only he ain’t never come out home yit when I lef’. I thought he wuz wid you, maybe.” Dust spun from beneath the horses’ feet and moiled in a sluggish cloud behind them. Against the thickening hedgerows their shadow rushed in failing surges, with twinkling spokes and high-stepping legs in a futility of motion without progress. “Wouldn’t even git off at de dee-po,” Simon continued, with a kind of fretful exasperation. “De dee-po his own folks built. Jumpin’ offen de blind side like a hobo. He never even-had on no sojer-clothes,” he added with frank injury. “Jes’ a suit, lak a drummer er somethin’. And when I ‘members dem shiny boots and dem light yeller pants and dat ‘ere double-jinted backin’-up strop he wo’ home las’ year…” Simon turned and looked back again, sharply. “Cunnel, you reckon dem war folks is done somethin’ ter him?”

“What do you mean?” Bayard demanded. “Is he lame?”

“I mean, him sneakm’ into his own town. Sneakin’ into de town his own gran’pappy built, on de ve’y railroad his own folks owns, jes’ like he wuz trash. Dem foreign white folks done done somethin’ ter him, er dey done sot dey police after him. I kep’ a-tellin’ him when he fust went off to dat ‘ere foreign war him and Mr. Johnny neither never had no business at—”

“Drive on,” Bayard said sharply…“Drive on, damn your black hide,” he repeated.

Simon clucked to the horses and shook them to a swifter gait. The road went on between hedgerows paralleling them with the senseless terrific antics of their shadow. Beyond the bordering gums and locusts and massed vines, fields new-broken or being broken spread on toward patches of woodland newly green and splashed with dogwood and judas trees. Behind the laborious plows viscid shards of new-turned earth glinted damply in the sun.

This was upland country, lying in tilted slopes against the unbroken blue of the hills, but soon the road dropped sheerly into a valley of good broad fields richly somnolent in the levelling afternoon. This was Bayard Sartoris’ land, and as they went on from time to time a negro lifted his hand from the plow handle in salute to the passing carriage. Then the road approached the railroad and crossed it, and a partridge and her brood of tiny dusty balls scuttered in the dust before them; and at last the house John Sartoris had built and rebuilt stood among locusts and oaks where mockingbirds were won’t to sing.

There was a bed of salvia where that Yankee patrol had halted on that day long ago. Simon brought up here with a flourish and Bayard descended and Simon clucked to the team again and drove off down the drive, rolling his cigar to a freer angle, and took the road back to town.

Bayard stood for a moment before his house, but the white simplicity of it dreamed unbroken amid its ancient sunshot trees. Wistaria mounting one end of the veranda had bloomed and fallen, and a faint drift of shattered petals lay palely about the dark roots of it and about the roots of a rose trained onto the same frame. The rose was slowly but steadily killing the other vine, and it bloomed now thickly with buds no bigger than a thumbnail and blown flowers no larger than silver dollars, myriad, odorless and unpickable.

But the house itself was still and serenely benignant, and he mounted to the empty, colonnaded veranda and crossed it and entered the high spacious hallway. The house was silent, richly desolate of motion or any sound.

“Bayard.”

The stairway with its white spindles and red carpet mounted in a tall slender curve into upper gloom. From the center of the ceiling hung a chandelier of crystal prisms and shades, fitted originally for candles but since wired for electricity; to the right of the entrance, beside folding doors opened upon a room emanating an atmosphere of dim and seldom violated stateliness and known as the parlor, stood a tall mirror pied with grave obscurity like a still pool of evening water. At the end of the hallway checkered sunlight fell in a long slant across the door and the world was drowsily monotonous without, and from somewhere beyond the bar of sunlight a voice rose and fell in a rapid preoccupied minor, like a chant. The words were not always distinguishable, but Bayard Sartoris could not hear them at all. He raised his voice again,

“Bayard.”

The chanting ceased, and as he turned toward the stairs a tall mulatto woman appeared in the slanting sunlight without the back door and came sibilantly into the hall. Her faded blue garment was pinned up about her knees and it was darkly and irregularly blotched. Beneath it her shanks were straight and lean as the legs of a tall bird, and her bare feet were pale coffee splashes on the dark polished floor.

“Wuz you callin’ somebody, Cunnel?” she said, raising her voice to penetrate his deafness. Bayard Sartoris paused with his hand on the walnut newel post and looked down at the woman’s pleasant yellow face.

“Has anybody come in this afternoon?” he asked.

“Why, naw, suh,” Elnora answered. “Dey ain’t nobody here a-tall, dat I knows about. Miss Jenny done gone to huh club-meetin’ in town dis evening,” she added. Bayard Sartoris stood with his foot raised to the step, staring down at her.

“Why in hell can’t you niggers tell me the truth about things?” he raged suddenly. “Or not tell me anything at all?”

“Lawd, Cunnel, who’d be comin’ out here, lessen you er Miss Jenny sont ‘um?” But he had gone on, tramping furiously up the stairs. The woman looked after him, then she called to him: “Does you want Isom, er anything?” But he went on without looking back. Perhaps he had not heard her, and she stood and watched him out of sight “He’s gittin’ old,” she said to herself quietly, and she turned on her sibilant bare feet and returned down the hall whence she had come.

Bayard Sartoris stopped again in the upper hall. The western windows were closed with latticed blinds, through which sunlight seeped in pale dissolving bars that but served to increase the gloom. At the opposite end a tall door opened upon a shallow grilled balcony which offered the valley and the cradling semicircle of the eastern hills in panorama. On either side of this door was a narrow window set with leaded varicolored panes that, with the bearer of them, constituted his mother’s deathbed legacy to him, which John Sartoris’ youngest sister had brought from Carolina in a straw-filled hamper in ‘69.

This was Virginia Du Pre, who came to them, two years a wife and seven years a widow at thirty—a slender woman with a delicate replica of the Sartoris nose and that expression of indomitable and utter weariness which all Southern women had learned to wear, bringing with her the clothing in which she stood and a wicker hamper filled with colored glass. It was she who told them of the manner of Bayard Sartoris’ death prior to the second battle of Manassas. She had told the story many times since (at eighty she still told it, on occasions usually inopportune) and as she grew older the tale itself grew richer and richer, taking on a mellow splendor like wine; until what had been a hair-brained prank of two heedless and reckless boys wild with their own youth, was become a gallant and finely tragical focal-point to which the history of the race had been raised from out the old miasmic swamps of spiritual sloth by two angels valiantly and glamorously fallen and strayed, altering the course of human events and purging the souls of men.

That Carolina Bayard had been rather a handful, even for Sartorises. Not so much a black sheep as a nuisance all of whose qualities were positive and unpredictable. His were merry blue eyes, and his rather long hair fell in tawny curls about his temples. His high-colored face wore that expression of frank and high-hearted dullness which you visualize Richard First as wearing before he went crusading, and he once hunted his pack of fox hounds through a rustic tabernacle in which a Methodist revival was being conducted; and thirty minutes later (having caught the fox) he returned alone and rode his horse into the ensuing indignation meeting. In a spirit of fun purely: he believed too firmly in Providence, as all his actions clearly showed, to have any religious convictions at all. So when Fort Moultrie fell and the governor of South Carolina refused to surrender it, the Sartorises were privately a little glad, for now Bayard would have something to do.

In Virginia, as an A.D.C. of Jeb Stuart’s, he found plenty to do. As the A.D.C. rather, for though Stuart had other aides, they were soldiers trying to win a war and needing sleep occasionally: Bayard Sartoris alone was willing, nay eager, to defer sleep and security to that time when monotony should return to the world. But now was a holiday without any restrictions whatever.

The war was also a godsend to Jeb Stuart, and shortly thereafter, against the dark and bloody obscurity of the northern Virginia campaigns, Jeb Stuart at thirty and Bayard Sartoris at twenty-three stood briefly like two flaming stars garlanded with Fame’s burgeoning laurel and the myrtle and roses of Death, incalculable and sudden as meteors in General Pope’s troubled military sky, thrusting upon him like an unwilling garment that notoriety which his skill as a soldier could never have won him. And still in a spirit of pure fun: neither Jeb Stuart nor Bayard Sartoris, as their actions clearly showed, had any political convictions involved at all.

Aunt Jenny told the story first shortly after she came to them. It was Christmas time and they sat before a hickory fire in the rebuilt library—Aunt Jenny with her sad resolute face and John Sartoris, bearded and hawklike, and his three children and a guest: a Scottish engineer whom John Sartoris had met in Mexico in ‘45 and who was now helping him to build his railway.

Work on the railroad had ceased for the holiday season and John Sartoris and his engineer had ridden in that dusk from the suspended railhead in the hills to the north, and they now sat after supper in the firelight. The sun had set ruddily, leaving the air brittle as thin glass with frost, and presently Joby came in with an armful of firewood. He put a fresh billet on the fire, and in the dry air the flames crackled and snapped, popping in fading embers outward upon the hearth.

“Chris’mus!” Joby exclaimed with the grave and simple pleasure of his race, prodding at the blazing logs with the Yankee musket-barrel which stood in the chimney corner until sparks swirled upward into the dark maw of the chimney like wild golden veils. “Year dat, chilluns?” John Sartoris’ eldest daughter was twenty-two and would be married in June, Bayard was twenty, and the younger girl seventeen; and so Aunt Jenny for all her widowhood was one of the chillen too, to Joby. Then he replaced the musket-barrel in its niche and fired a long pine sliver at the hearth in order to light the candles. But Aunt Jenny stayed him, and he was gone—a shambling figure in an old formal coat too large for him, stooped and gray with age; and Aunt Jenny, speaking always of Jeb Stuart as Mister Stuart, told her story.

It had to do with an April evening, and coffee. Or the lack of it, rather; and Stuart’s military family sat in scented darkness beneath a new moon, talking of ladies and dead pleasures and thinking of home. Away in the darkness horses moved invisibly with restful sounds, and bivouac fires fell to glowing points like spent fireflies, and somewhere neither near nor far the General’s body servant touched a guitar in lingering random chords. Thus they sat in the poignance of spring and youth’s immemorial sadness, forgetting travail and glory, remembering instead other Virginian evenings with fiddles above the myriad candles and slender grave measures picked out with light laughter and lighter feet; thinking When will this be again? Shall I make one? until they had talked themselves into a state of savage nostalgia and words grew shorter and shorter and less and less frequent. Then the General roused himself and brought them back by speaking of coffee, or its lack.

This talk of coffee began to end a short time later with a ride along midnight roads and then through woods black as pitch, where horses went at a walk and riders rode with sabre or musket at arm’s length before them lest they be swept from their saddles by invisible boughs, and continued until the forest thinned with dawn-ghosts and the party of twenty was well within the Federal lines. Then dawn accomplished itself yet more and all efforts toward concealment were discarded and the horsemen dashed on and crashed through astonished picket-parties returning placidly to camp, and fatigue parties setting forth with picks and shovels and axes in the golden sunrise, and swept yelling up the knoll on which General Pope and his staff sat at breakfast al fresco.

Two men captured a fat staff-major, others pursued the fleeing officers for a short distance into the sanctuary of the woods, but most of them rushed on to Pope’s private commissary tent and emerged presently from the cyclonic demolition of it, bearing sundry parcels. Stuart and the three officers with him halted their dancing mounts at the table and one of them swept up a huge blackened coffee pot and tendered it to the General, and while the enemy shouted and let off muskets among the trees, they toasted each other in sugarless and creamless scalding coffee, as with a loving cup.

“General Pope, Sir,” Stuart said, bowing in his saddle to the captured officer. He drank and extended the pot.

“I’ll drink it, Sir,” the major replied, “and thank God he is not here to respond in person.”

“I had remarked that he appeared to leave hurriedly,” Stuart said. “A prior engagement, perhaps?”

“Yes, Sir. With General Halleck,” the major agreed drily. “I am sorry we have him for an opponent instead of Lee.”

“So am I, Sir,” Stuart replied. “I like General Pope in a war.” Bugles were shrilling among the trees far and near, sending the alarm in flying echoes from brigade to brigade lying about the forest, and drums were beating wildly to arms and erratic bursts of musketry surged and trickled along the scattered outposts like the dry clatter of an opening fan, for the name ‘Stuart’ speeding from picket to picket had peopled the blossoming peaceful woods with grey phantoms.

Stuart turned in his saddle and his men came up and sat their horses and watched him alertly, their spare eager faces like mirrors reflecting their leader’s constant consuming flame. Then from the right there came something like a concerted volley, striking the coffee pot from Bayard Sartoris’ hand and clipping and snapping viciously among the dappled branches above their heads.

“Be pleased to mount, Sir,” Stuart said to the captured officer, and though his tone was exquisitely courteous all levity was. gone from it. “Captain Wyatt, you have the heaviest mount: will you—?” The captain freed his stirrup and hauled the prisoner up behind him. “Forward!” the General said and whirled roweling his bay, and with the thunderous coordination of a single centaur they swept down the knoll and crashed into the forest at the point from which the volley had come before it could be repeated Blue-clad pigmy shapes plunged scattering before and beneath them, and they rushed on among trees vicious with minies like myriad bees. Stuart now carried his plumed hat in his hand and his long tawny locks, tossing to the rhythm of Iris speed; appeared as gallant flames smoking with the wild and self-consuming splendor of his daring.

Behind them and on one flank muskets still banged and popped at the flashing phantoms of their passing, and from brigade to brigade lying spaced about the jocund forest bugles shrilled their importunate alarms. Stuart bore gradually to the left, bringing all the uproar into his rear. The country became more open and they swung into column at the gallop. The captured major bounced and jolted behind Captain Wyatt, and the General reined his horse back beside the gallant black thundering along beneath its double burden.

“I am distressed to inconvenience you thus, Sir,” he began with his exquisite courtesy. “If you will indicate the general location of your nearest horse picket I shall be most happy to capture a mount for you.”

“Thank you, General,” the major replied, “but majors can be replaced much easier than horses. I shall not trouble you.”

“Just as you wish, Sir,” Stuart agreed stiffly. He spurred on to the head of the column again. They now galloped along a faint trace that was once a road. It wound on between vernal palisades of undergrowth and they followed it at a rapid controlled gait and debouched suddenly upon a glade, and a squadron of Yankee cavalry reined back with shocked amazement, then hurled forward again.

Without a break in their speed Stuart whirled his party and plunged back into the forest. Pistol-balls were thinly about their heads and the flat tossing reports were trivial as snapping twigs above the converging thunder of hooves. Stuart swerved from the road and they crashed headlong through undergrowth. The Federal horsemen came yelling behind them and Stuart led his party in a tight circle and halted it panting in a dense copse and they heard the pursuit sweep past.

They pushed on and regained the road and retraced their former course, silently and utterly alert.

To the left the sound of the immediate pursuit crashed and died away. Then they cantered again. Presently the woods thickened and they were forced to slow to a trot, then to a walk, Although there was no more firing and the bugles too had ceased, into the silence, above the strong and rapid breathing of the horses and the sound of their own hearts in their ears, was a nameless something—a tenseness seeping like an invisible mist from tree to tree, filling the dewy morning woods with portent though birds flashed swooping from tree to tree, unaware or disregarded of it.

A gleam of white through the trees ahead; Stuart raised his hand and they halted and sat their horses, watching him quietly and holding their breaths with listening. Then the General advanced again and broke through the undergrowth into another glade and they followed, and before them rose the knoll with the deserted breakfast table and the rifled commissary tent. They trotted across the glade and halted at the table while the General scribbled hastily upon a scrap of paper. The glade dreamed quiet and empty of threat beneath the mounting golden day; laked within it lay a deep and abiding peace like golden wine; yet beneath this solitude and permeating it was that nameless and waiting portent, patient and brooding and sinister.

“Your sword, Sir,” Stuart commanded, and the prisoner removed his weapon and Stuart took it and pinned his scribbled note to the table-top with it. The note read:

“General Stuart’s compliments to General Pope, and he is sorry to have missed him again. He will call again tomorrow.”

Stuart gathered his reins, forward,” he said.

They descended the knoll and crossed the empty glade and at an easy canter they took the road they had traversed that dawn—the road that led toward home. Stuart glanced back at his captive, at the gallant black with its double burden. “If you will direct us to the nearest cavalry picket I will provide you with a proper mount,” he offered again.

“Will General Stuart, cavalry leader and General Lee’s eyes, jeopardize his safety and that of his men and his cause in order to provide for the temporary comfort of a minor prisoner of his sword? This is not bravery: it is. the rashness of a heedless and headstrong boy. There are fifteen thousand men within a radius of two miles of this point; even General’ Stuart cannot conquer that many, though they are Yankees, single-handed.”

“Not for the prisoner, Sir,” Stuart replied haughtily, “but for the officer suffering the fortune of war. No gentleman would do less.”

“No gentleman has any business in this war,” the major retorted. “There is no place for him here. He is an anachronism, like anchovies. General Stuart did not capture our anchovies,” he added tauntingly. “Perhaps he will send Lee for them in person?”

“Anchovies,” repeated Bayard Sartoris who galloped nearby, and he whirled his horse. Stuart shouted at him, but he lifted his reckless stubborn hand and flashed on; and as the General would have turned to follow a Yankee picket fired his musket from the roadside and darted into the woods, shouting the alarm. Immediately other muskets exploded on all sides and from the forest to the right came the sound of a considerable body put suddenly into motion, and behind them in the direction of the knoll, a volley crashed. A third officer spurred up and caught Stuart’s bridle.

“Sir, Sir,” he exclaimed. “What would you do?”

Stuart held his horse rearing, and another volley rang behind them, dribbling off into single scattered reports, crashed focalized again, and the noise to the right swelled nearer. “Let go, Allan,” Stuart said. “He is my friend.”

But the other clung on. “It is too late,” he said. “Sartoris can only be killed: you would be captured.”

“Forward, Sir, I beg,” the captive major added. “What is one man, to a paladin out of romance?”

“Think of Lee, for God’s sake, General!? the aide implored, forward!” he shouted to the troop, spurring his own horse and dragging the General’s onward as a body of Federal horse burst from “the woods behind them.

“And so” Aunt Jenny finished, “Mister Stuart went on and Bayard rode back after those anchovies, with all Pope’s army shooting at him. He rode yelling Yaaaiiih, Yaaaiiih, come on, boys!’ right up the knoll and jumped his horse over the breakfast table and rode it into the wrecked commissary tent, and a cook who was hidden under the mess stuck his arm out and shot Bayard in the back with a derringer.

“Mister Stuart fought his way out and got back home without losing but two men. He always spoke well of Bayard. He said he was a good officer and a fine cavalryman, but that he was too reckless.”

They sat quietly for a time, in the firelight. The flames leaped and popped on the hearth and sparks soared in wild swirling plumes up the chimney, and Bayard Sartoris’ brief career swept like a shooting star across the dark plain of their mutual remembering and suffering, lighting it with a transient glare like a soundless thunder-clap, leaving a sort of radiance when it died. The guest, the Scottish engineer, had sat quietly, listening. After a time he spoke.

“When he rode back, he was not actually certain there were anchovies, was he?” .

“The Yankee major said there were,” Aunt Jenny replied.

“Ay.” The Scotsman pondered again. “And did Mister Stuart return next day, as he said in ’s note?”

“He went back that afternoon,” Aunt Jenny answered, “looking for Bayard.” Ashes soft as rosy feathers shaled glowing onto the hearth, and faded to the softest gray. John Sartoris leaned forward into the firelight and punched at the blazing logs with the Yankee musket-barrel.

“That was the god-damdest army the world ever saw, I reckon,” he said.

“Yes,” Aunt Jenny agreed. “And Bayard was the god-damdest man in it.”

“Yes,” John Sartoris admitted soberly, “Bayard was wild.” The Scotsman spoke again.

“This Mister Stuart, who said your brother was reckless: Who was he?”

“He was the cavalry general Jeb Stuart,” Aunt Jenny answered. She brooded for a while upon the fire; her pale indomitable face held for a moment a tranquil tenderness. “He had a strange sense of humor,” she said. “Nothing ever seemed quite so diverting to him as General Pope in his night-shirt,” She dreamed once more on some faraway place beyond the rosy battlements of the embers. “Poor man,” she said. Then she said quietly: “I danced a valse with him in Baltimore in ‘58,” and her voice was proud and still as banners in the dust.

...But the door was closed now, and what light passed through the colored panes was richly and solemnly hushed. To his left was his grandsons’ room, the room in which .his grandson’s wife and her child had died last October. He stood beside this door for a moment, then he opened it quietly. The blinds were closed and the room was empty, and he stood on the dark threshold for a while. Then he slammed the door to and tramped on with that heavy-footed obliviousness of the deaf and entered his own bedroom and crashed the door behind him, as was his way of shutting doors.

He sat down and removed his shoes, the shoes that were “made to his measure twice a year by a Saint Louis house, then he rose and went in his stockings to the window and looked down upon his saddle-mare tethered to a mulberry tree in the back yard and a negro lad lean and fluid of movement as a hound, lounging richly static nearby. From the direction of the kitchen, invisible from this window, Elnora’s endless minor ebbed and flowed unheard by him upon the lazy scene.

He crossed to his closet and drew therefrom a pair of scarred and stained riding-boots and stamped into them and took a cigar from the humidor on the table beside his huge walnut bed, and he stood for a time with the cigar clamped between his teeth, having forgotten to light it Through the doth of his pocket his hand touched the pipe there, and he took it out and laid it on top of his chest of drawers. Then he quitted the room and banged the door behind him and tramped heavily down the stairs and out the backdoor.

Isom waked easily and untethered the mare and held the stirrup. He mounted and remembered the cigar at last and fired it Isom opened the gate into the lot and closed it, and trotted on ahead and opened the gate that let his master into the field beyond, and closed that one. Bayard rode on, trailing his pungent smoke.

Elnora stood barelegged in the center of the kitchen floor and soused her mop into the pail and thumped it on the floor again.

“Sinner riz fum de moaner’s bench,

Sinner jump to de penance bench;

When de preacher ax’im whut de reason why,

Says ‘Preacher got de women jes’ de same ez I’.

Oh, Lawd, Oh Lawd!

Dat’s whut de matter wid de church today.”

2

Simon’s destination was a huge brick House set well up onto the street. The lot had been the site of a fine old colonial house which rose among magnolias and oaks and flowering shrubs. But the house had burned and some of the trees had been felled to make room for an architectural garbling so imposingly terrific as to possess a kind of chaotic majesty. It was a monument to the frugality (and the mausoleum of the social aspirations of his women) of a hillman who had moved in from a small settlement called Frenchman’s Bend and who, as Miss Jenny Du Pre put it, had built the handsomest house in Frenchman’s Bend on the most beautiful lot in Jefferson. The hillman had stuck it out for two years during which his womenfolks sat about the veranda all morning in lace-trimmed “boudoir caps” and spent the afternoons in colored silk riding through the streets in a new rubber-tired surrey; then the hillman sold his house to a newcomer in the town and took his women back to the country and doubtless set them to work again.

A number of motor cars ranked along the street lent a formally festive air to the place, and Simon with his tilted cigar stub wheeled up and drew rein and indulged in a brief colorful altercation with a negro sitting behind the wheel of a car parked before the hitching-block. “Don’t block off no Sartoris car’iage, black boy,” he added when the other had moved the motor and permitted Simon access to the post. “Block off de commonality, ef you wants, ‘but don’t intervoke no equipage waitin’ on Cunnel or Miss Jenny. Dey won’t stand for it.”

He descended and tethered the team, and his spirit mollified by the rebuke administered and laved with the beatitude of having gained his own way, Simon paused and examined the motor car with curiosity and no little superciliousness tinged faintly with envious awe, and spoke affably with its conductor. But not for long, for Simon had sisters in the Lord in this kitchen, and presently he let himself through the gate and followed the path that led around to the back. He could hear the party going on as he passed beneath the windows: that stained unintelligible gabbling with which white ladies could surround themselves without effort and which they seemed to consider a necessary (or unavoidable) adjunct to having a good time. The fact that it was a card party would have seemed neither paradoxical nor astonishing to Simon, for time and much absorbing experience had taught him a fine tolerance of white folks’ vagaries and for those of ladies of any color.

The hillman had built his house so close to the street that the greater part of the original lawn with its fine old trees lay behind it. There were once crepe-myrtle and syringa and lilac and jasmine bushes without order, and casual stumps and fences with honeysuckle overgrown; and after the original house had burned these had taken the place and made of its shaggy formality a mazed and scented jungle loved of mockingbirds and thrushes, where boys and girls lingered on spring and summer nights among drifting fireflies and choiring whip-poor-wills. Then the hillman had bought it and cut some of the trees in order to build his house near the street after the country fashion, and chopped out the jungle of bushes and vines and whitewashed the remaining trees and ran his barn- and hog- and chicken-lot fences between their ghostly trunks. He didn’t remain long enough to learn of garages.

Some of the antiseptic desolation of his tenancy had faded now, and its present owner had set out more shrubbery—jasmine and mock-orange and verbena—with green iron tables and chairs beneath them and a pool and a tennis court; and Simon passed on with discreet assurance, and on a consonantless drone of female voices he rode into the kitchen where a thin woman in a funereal purple turban and poising a beaten biscuit heaped with a mayonnaise-impregnated something in a soiled kid glove, and a mountainous one in the stained apron of her calling and drinking melted ice-cream from a saucer, rolled their eyes at him.

“I seed him on de street yistiddy and he looked bad; he jes’ didn’t favor hisself,” the visitor was saying as Simon entered, but they dropped the theme of conversation immediately and made him welcome.

“Ef it ain’t Brother Strother,” they said in unison. “Come in, Brother Strother. How is you?”

“Po’ly, ladies; po’ly,” Simon replied. He doffed his hat and unclamped his cigar and stowed it away in the hat-band. “I’se had a right smart mis’ry in de back. Is y’all kep’ well?”

“Right well, I thank you, Brother Strother,” the visitor replied. Simon drew a chair up to the table, as he was bidden.

“What you gwine eat, Brother Strother?” the cook demanded hospitably. “Dey’s party fixin’s, and dey’s some cole greens and a little sof’ ice-cream lef’ f’um dinner.”

“I reckon I’ll have a little ice-cream and some of dem greens, Sis’ Rachel,” Simon replied. “My teef ain’t much on party doin’s no mo’.” The cook rose with majestic deliberation and waddled across to a pantry and reached down a platter. She was one of the best cooks in Jefferson: no mistress dared protest against the social amenities of Rachel’s kitchen.

“Ef you ain’t de beatin’es’ man!” the first guest exclaimed. “Eatin’ ice-cream at yo’ age!”

“I been eatin’ ice-cream sixty years,” Simon said. “Whut reason! got fer quittin’ now?”

“Dat’s right, Brother Strother,” the cook agreed, placing the dish before him. “Eat yo’ ice-cream when you kin git it Jes’ a minute and I’ll—Here, Meloney,” she interrupted herself as a young light negressJn a smart white apron and cap entered, bearing a tray of plates containing remnants of edible edifices copied from pictures in ladies’ magazines and possessing neither volume nor nourishment, with which the party had been dulling its palates against supper, “git Brother Strother a bowl of dat ‘ere ice cream, honey.”

The girl clashed the tray into the sink and rinsed a bowl at the water tap while Simon watched her with his still little eyes. She whipped the bowl through a towel with a fine show of derogatory carelessness, and with her nose at a supercilious angle she clattered on her high heels across the kitchen, still under Simon’s unwinking regard, and slammed a door behind her. Then Simon turned his head again.

“Yes, ma’am,” he repeated, “I been eatin’ ice cream too long to quit at my age.”

“Dey won’t no vittle hurt you ez long ez you kin stomach ‘um,” the cook agreed, raising her saucer to her lips again. The girl returned with her head still averted and set the bowl of viscid liquid before Simon who, under cover of this movement, dropped his hand on her thigh. The girl smacked him sharply on the back of his gray head with her flat palm.

“Miss Rachel, can’t you make him keep his hands to hisself?”

“Ain’t you ‘shamed,” Rachel demanded, but without rancor. “A ole gray-head man like you, wid a family of grown chillen and one foot in de cemetery?”

“Hush yo’ mouf, woman,” Simon said placidly, spooning spinach into his soft ice-cream. “Ain’t dey erbout breakin’ up in yonder yit?”

“I reckon dey’s erbout to,” the other guest answered, putting another laden biscuit into her mouth with a gesture of elegant gentility. “Seems like dey’s talkin’ louder.”

“Den dey’s started playin’ again,” Simon corrected. “Talkin’ jes’ eased off whiles dey et. Yes, suh, dey’s started playin’ again. Dat’s white folks. Nigger ain’t got sense ernough to play cards wid all dat racket goin’ on.”

But they were breaking up. Miss Jenny Du Pre had just finished a story which left the three players at her table avoiding one another’s eyes a little self-consciously, as was her way. Miss Jenny travelled very little, and in Pullman smokerooms not at all, and people wondered where she got her stories; who had told them to her. And she repeated them anywhere and at any time, choosing the wrong moment and the wrong audience with a cold and cheerful audacity. Young people liked her, and she was much in demand as a chaperone for picnic parties.

She now spoke across the room to the hostess. “I’m going home, Belle,” she stated. “I think we are all tired of your party, I know I am.” The hostess was a plump, youngish woman and her cleverly rouged face showed now an hysterical immersion that was almost repose, but when Miss Jenny broke into her consciousness with the imminence of departure this faded quickly, and her face resumed its familiar expression of strained and vague dissatisfaction and she protested conventionally but with a petulant sincerity, as a well-bred child might,

But Miss; Jenny was adamant and she rose and her slender wrinkled hand brushed invisible crumbs from the bosom of her black silk dress. “If I stay any longer I’ll miss Bayard’s toddy time,” she explained with her usual forthrightness, “Come on, Narcissa, and I’ll drive you home”

“I have my car, thank you, Miss Jenny,” the young woman to whom she spoke replied in a grave contralto, rising also; and the others rose with sibilant gathering motions above the petulant modulation of the hostess’ protestings, and they drifted slowly into the hall and clotted again before mirrors, colorful and shrill Miss Jenny pushed steadily toward the door.

“Come along, come along,” she repeated. “Harry Mitchell won’t want to run into all this gabble when he comes home from work.”

“Then he can sit in the car out in the garage,” the hostess rejoined sharply. “I do wish you wouldn’t go. Miss Jenny, I don’t think I’ll ask you again.”

But Miss Jenny only said “Goodbye, goodbye” with cold affability, and with her delicate replica of the Sartoris nose and that straight grenadier’s back of hers which gave the pas for erectness to only one back in town—that of her nephew Bayard—she stood at the top of the steps, where Narcissa Benbow joined her, bringing with her like an odor that aura of grave and serene repose in which she dwelt. “Belle meant that, too,” Miss Jenny said.

“Meant what, Miss Jenny?”

“About Harry...Now, where do you suppose that damn nigger went to?” They descended the steps and from the parked motors along the street came muffled starting explosions, and the two women traversed the brief flower-bordered walk to the curb. “Did you see which way my driver went?” Miss Jenny asked of the negro in the car next her carriage.

“He went to’ds de back, ma’am.” The negro opened the door and slid his legs, clad in army o.d. and linoleum putties, to the ground. “I’ll go git him.”

“Thank you. Well, thank the Lord that’s over,” she added. “It’s too bad folks haven’t the sense or courage to send out invitations, then shut up the house and go away. All the fun of parties is in dressing and getting there, I think.” Ladies came in steady shrill groups down the walk and got into various cars or departed on foot with bright, not-quite-musical calls to one another. The northward-swinging sun was down beyond Belle’s house, and in the shadow of the house the soft silken shades of the women’s clothes were hushed delicately until the wearers reached the edge of the shadow and passed into a level spotlight of sun, where they became delicately brilliant as the plumage of paroquets. Narcissa Benbow wore gray and her eyes were violet, and in her face was that serene repose of lilies.

“Not children’s parties,” she protested.

“I’m talking about parties, not about having a goodtime,” Miss Jenny retorted. “Speaking of children: What’s the news from Horace?”

“Oh, hadn’t I told you?” the other said quickly. “I had a wire yesterday. He landed in New York Wednesday. It was such a mixed-up sort of message, I never could understand what he was trying to tell me, except that he would have to stay in New York for a few days. It was over fifty words long.”

“Was it a straight message?” Miss Jenny asked, and when the other said Yes, she added: ‘‘Horace must have got rich, like the soldiers say all the Y.M.C.A, did. If it has taught a man like him to make money, the war was a pretty good thing, after all.”

“Miss Jenny! How can you talk that way, after John’s—after—“

“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said. “The war just gave John a good excuse to get himself killed. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been some other way that would have been a bother to everybody around.”

“Miss Jenny!”

“I know, my dear. I’ve lived with these bullheaded Sartorises for eighty years, and I’ll never give a single ghost of ‘em the satisfaction of shedding a tear over him. What did Horace’s message say?”

“It was about something he was bringing home with him” the other answered, and her serene face filled with a sort of fond exasperation. “It was such an incoherent message...Horace never could say anything clearly from a distance.” She mused again, gazing down the street with its tunnel of oaks and elms through which sunlight fell in spaced tiger bars. “Do you suppose he could have adopted a war-orphan?”

“War-orphan,” repeated Miss Jenny. “More likely it’s some war-orphan’s mamma.” Simon appeared at the corner of the house, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, and came with shuffling celerity across the lawn. His cigar was not in view.

“No,” the other said quickly, with grave concern. “You don’t 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 don’t think that sounds like Horace, do you?”

“Humph,” 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 wimmen? 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 someone was keeping his supper warm on the stove when he was late, or holding sugar out on the other men to sweeten his coffee with. Horace was born to 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 team and stood at the carriage step in his Miss Jenny attitude. It differed from the bank one; in place of that leashed military imminence, it was now a gallant and slightly patronizing deference. Miss Jenny gazed at the still serenity of the younger woman’s face.

“Why don’t you get married, and let that baby look after himself for a while? Mark my words, it won’t be six weeks before some other woman will be falling all over herself for the privilege of keeping his feet dry, and he won’t even miss you.”

“I promised mother,” the other replied quietly and without offense...“I don’t 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 mounted with Simon’s assistance, and Simon got in and gathered up the reins.

“Let us know when he does get home,” she called as the carriage moved forward. “Drive out and get some more jasmine when you want it.”

“Thank you. Goodbye.”

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

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

“Where is he?” Miss Jenny demanded immediately;

“He ain’t come out home yit,” Simon answered. “I ‘speck he went to de graveyard.”

“Fiddlesticks!” Miss Jenny snapped. “No Sartoris ever goes to the cemetery but one time…Does Colonel know he’s home?”

“Yessum, I tole him, but he don’t ack like he believed I wuz tellin’ him de troof.”

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

“I ain’t seed him neither,” Simon disclaimed. “Section han’ seed him 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 him,” Simon repeated stubbornly. “I reckon he knowed Mist’ Bayard when he seed him.”

“Well, where is he, then?”

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

“Drive on!” Miss Jenny said sharply.

Miss Jenny found her nephew sitting with two bird-dogs in his library. 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 Sartoris’ 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 oh various occasions 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 mind, yet preserved just the same. The room contained an enormous closet with a padlocked door, and a big table littered with yet other casual objects, and a locked roll-top desk (keys and locks were an obsession with him) and a divan and three big leather chairs. This room was always referred to as the office, and Bayard Sartoris now sat in it with his hat on and still wearing his riding-boots, transferring bourbon whisky from a small compact 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 backyard, or during the hot summer days, in the cool dusty obscurity beneath the kitchen floor. But toward the middle of the afternoon it went to the front of the house and waited there quietly until it heard the carriage coming up the drive, and when Bayard Sartoris had descended and passed into the house it returned to the back and waited again until Isom led the mare up to the back porch and Bayard Sartoris came out and mounted. Then together they spent the afternoon going quietly and unhurriedly about the grazing meadows and the planting or harvesting fields and the peaceful woodlands in their dreaming seasonal mutations—the man on his horse and the ticked setter gravely beside him, while the descending evening of their fives drew toward its peaceful close upon the kind land that had bred them both. The other dog was a two-year-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 mid procession, he never remained very long but must presently dash away with lolling tongue 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 beyond every thicket and copse and ravine,

Bayard Sartoris1 boots were wet to the tops and the soles were rimmed with mud, and he bent in intense preoccupation above his keg and bottle under the sober curiosity of the two dogs. The keg was propped in another chair with the bung upward and he was siphoning the rich liquor delicately into the decanter through a slender rubber tube. Miss Jenny came straight through the house and, entered the library with her black bonnet still perched on the exact top of her trim white head, and the two 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 Sartoris did not raise his head. Miss Jenny closed the door and gazed 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, watching the clear brown liquor mount steadily in the decanter. At times Bayard Sartoris’ deafness was very convenient, more convenient than actual, perhaps; but who could know this certainly? “You go upstairs and get those boots off,” Miss Jenny commanded, coming into the room. “I’ll fill the decanter.”

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

But Miss Jenny had returned and opened the door again and she 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 her nephew 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 Sartoris 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 right 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 Sartoris 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 ain’t wet,” Simon answered. But she bent and felt them herself.

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

“Precious little fault of his, that they ain’t,” she said across the topless wall of his deafness. “And then you have to come along with that fool yarn of yours about Mr. Bayard.”

“Section han’ seed him,” Simon repeated stubbornly, thrusting the slippers onto Bayard Sartoris’ feet. “I ain’t never said I seed him.” He stood up and rubbed his hands on his thighs.

Bayard Sartoris stomped his feet into the slippers. “Bring the toddy fixings Simon.” Then to his aunt, in a casual tone: “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 added. Simon returned and sidled swiftly to the hearth and gathered up the boots. “And take these dogs out of here, too,” she said. “Thank the Lord Bayard hasn’t thought about bringing his horse in here, too.” 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 Sartoris and Simon obeyed Miss Jenny’s implacable will.

“Simon says—” Bayard Sartoris repeated.

“Simon says fiddlesticks!” Miss Jenny snapped. “Have you lived with Simon sixty years without learning that he don’t 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 what remained of Simon’s grizzled 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 which Demosthenes would have envied and that even mules comprehended and of whose intent the most obtuse persons remained not long unawares; and beneath it Simon’s head bobbed lower and lower and the fine assumption of detached preoccupation moulted like feathers from about his defenseless self, 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,” Miss Jenny finished, “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 library, 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 that some of the spoon handles 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 bam 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 dung about him always, even when he was swept and garnished for church and a little shapeless in a discarded Prince Albert coat of Bayard Sartoris’; and his every advent into the dining room with dishes brought with him, and the easy attitudes into which he fell near the buffet while answering Miss Jenny’s abrupt questions or while pursuing some fragmentary conversation which he and Bayard Sartoris 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 putting them into, words, but it was very seldom that she descended to gossip. Meanwhile Bayard Sartoris 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 his supper steadily. Presently they had done and Miss Jenny rang the little silver bell beside her and Simon opened the door and received again the cold broadside of her glare, and shut the door and lurked behind it until they had left the room.

Bayard Sartoris lit his cigar in the library 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 supply 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.

Presently he rose, with one of his sudden plunging movements, and Miss Jenny watched him while 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 through the oaks and locusts along the drive. Bayard Sartoris 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 ball, Elnora’s voice floated in meaningless minor suspense.

Miss Jenny turned aside just within the door and groped about the yawning lesser obscurity of the mirror until she found her nephew’s felt hat, and she carried it out to him and put it in his hand. “Don’t sit out here too long, now. It ain’t summer yet.”

He grunted indistinguishably, but he put the hat on and she turned away and went back to the library and finished the paper and folded it and laid it on the table. She snapped the light off and mounted the dark stairs to her room. The moon shone above the trees at this height and it fell in broad silver bars through the eastern windows:

Before turning up the light she crossed to the southern wall and raised a window there, upon the crickets and frogs and somewhere a mockingbird. Outside this window was a magnolia tree, but it was not to bloom yet, nor had the honeysuckle massed along the garden fence flowered. But this would be soon, and from here she could overlook the garden, could look down upon Cape jasmine and syringa and calycanthus where the moon lay upon their bronze and yet unflowered sleep, and upon those other shoots and graftings from Carolina and Virginian gardens she had known as a girl.

Just beyond the corner from this window the kitchen lay, and Elnora’s voice welled in mellow falling suspense. All folks talkin’ ‘bout heaven ain’t gwine dere Elnora sang, and presently she and Simon emerged into the moonlight and took the path to Simon’s house below the barn. Simon had fired his cigar at last, and the evil smoke of it trailed behind him, fading; but when they had gone it still seemed that the rank pungency of it lingered yet within the sound of the crickets and of the frogs upon the silver air, mingled and blended inextricably with the dying fall of Elnora’s voice.

All folks talkin’ ‘bout heaven ain’t gwine dere

His cigar was cold, and he moved and dug a match from his waistcoat and relit it and braced his feet again upon the railing, and again the drifting sharpness of tobacco lay along the windless currents of the silver air, straying and fading slowly amid locust-breaths and the ceaseless fairy reiteration of crickets and frogs. There was a mockingbird somewhere down the valley, far away, and in a while another sang from the magnolia at the corner of the garden fence. An automobile passed along the smooth valley road, slowed for the railway crossing, then sped on again, and when the sound of it had died away, the whistle of the nine-thirty train swelled from among the hills.

Two long blasts with dissolving echoes, two short following ones; but before it came in sight his cigar was cold again, and he sat holding it in his old fingers and watched the locomotive drag its string of yellow windows up the valley and into the hills again, where after a time it whistled once more, arrogant and resonant and sad. John Sartoris had sat so on this veranda and watched his two trains emerge from the hills and traverse the valley into the hills again, with lights and smoke and bells and a noisy simulation of speed. But now his railway belonged to a syndicate and there were more than two trains on it, and they ran from Chicago to the Gulf, completing his dream, though John Sartoris himself slept these many years unawares perhaps amid martial cherubim, lapped in the useless vainglory of that Lord which his forefathers had imagined themselves in the rare periods of their metaphysical speculations.

Then his cigar was cold again and he sat and held it in his fingers and watched a tall shape emerge from the lilac bushes along the garden fence and across the patchy moonlight toward the veranda where he sat His grandson wore no hat and he came on and mounted the steps and stood with the moonlight bringing the hawklike planes of his face into high relief while his grandfather sat holding his dead cigar and looked at him.

“Bayard, son?” old Bayard said. Young Bayard stood in the .moonlight His eyesockets were cavernous shadows.

“I tried to keep him from going up there on that goddam little popgun,” he said at last with brooding savageness. Then he moved again and old Bayard lowered his feet from the rail; but his grandson only dragged a chair violently up beside him and flung himself into it. His motions were abrupt also, like his grandfather’s, but controlled and flowing for all their violence.

“Why in hell didn’t you let me know you were coming?” old Bayard demanded. “What do you mean, straggling in here like this?”

“I didn’t let anybody know.” Young Bayard dug a cigarette from his pocket and raked a match on his shoe.

“What?”

“I didn’t tell anybody I was coming,” he repeated above the cupped match, raising his voice.

“Simon knew it. Do you inform nigger servants of your movements instead of your own gran’daddy?”

“Damn Simon, sir,” young Bayard shouted. “Who set him to watching me?”

“Don’t yell at me, boy,” old Bayard shouted in turn. His grandson flung the match away and drew at the cigarette in deep troubled draughts. “Don’t wake Jenny,” old Bayard added more mildly, striking a match to his cold and spent cigar. “All right, are you?” Young Bayard saw that his hands were trembling.

“Here,” he said, extending his hand. “Let me hold it. You’re going to set your moustache on fire.” But old Bayard repulsed him sharply and sucked stubbornly and impotently at the match in his unsteady fingers.

“I said, are you all right?” he repeated.

“Why not?” young Bayard snapped. “Takes damn near as big a fool to get hurt in a war as it does in peacetime. Damn fool, that’s what it is.” He drew at the cigarette again, then he hurled it not half consumed after the match. “There was one I had to lay for four days to catch him. Had to get Sibleigh in an old crate of a D.H. to suck him in for me. Wouldn’t look at anything but cold meat, him and his skull and bones. Well, he got it. Stayed on him for six thousand feet, put a whole belt right into his cockpit. You could a covered ‘em all with your hat. But the bastard just wouldn’t burn.” Young Bayard’s voice rose again as he talked on. Locust drifted up in sweet gusts upon the air, and the crickets and frogs were clear and monotonous as pipes blown drowsily by an idiot boy. From her silver casement the moon looked down upon the valley dissolving in opaline tranquility into the serene mysterious infinitude of the hills, and young Bayard’s voice went on and on, recounting violence and speed and death.

“Hush,” old Bayard said again. “You’ll wake Jenny,” and his grandson’s voice Sank obediently; but soon it rose again; above the dark and stubborn struggling of his heart, and soon Miss Jenny emerged with her white woolen shawl over her night-dress and came and kissed him.

“I reckon you’re all right,” she said, “or you wouldn’t be in such a bad humor. Tell us about Johnny.”

“He was drunk,” young Bayard answered harshly. “Or a fool. I tried to keep him from going up there, on that damn Camel You couldn’t see. your hand, that morning. Air all full of hunks of cloud and any fool could a known that on their side it’d be full of Fokkers that could reach twenty-five thousand, and him on a damn Camel. But he was hell-bent on going up there, damn hear to Lille. I couldn’t keep him from it. He shot at me,” young Bayard said. “I tried to head him off and drive him back, but he gave me a burst. He was already high as he could get, but they must have been five thousand feet above us when they spotted us. They flew all over him. Hemmed him up like a damn calf in a pen while one of them sat right on his tail until he took fire and jumped. Then they streaked for home.” Locust drifted and drifted on the still air, and the silver rippling of the tree frogs. In the magnolia at the corner of the house the mockingbird sang. Down the valley another one replied.

“Streaked for home, with the rest of his gang,” young Bayard said. “Him and his skull and bones. It was Ploeckner,” he added, and for the moment his voice was still and untroubled with vindicated pride. “He was one of the best they had. Pupil of Richthofen’s.”

“Well, that’s something,” Miss Jenny agreed, stroking his head. Young Bayard brooded for a time.

“I tried to keep him from going up there on that goddam little popgun,” he burst out again.

“What did you expect, after the way you raised him?” Miss Jenny demanded. “You’re the oldest...You’ve been to the cemetery, haven’t you?”

“Yessum,” he answered quietly.

“What’s that?” old Bayard demanded.

“That old fool Simon said that’s where you were...You come on and eat your supper,” she said briskly and firmly, entering his life again without a by-your-leave, taking up the snarled threads of it after her brisk and capable fashion, and he rose obediently.

“What’s that?” old Bayard repeated.

“And you come on in, too.” Miss Jenny swept him also into the orbit of her will as you gather a garment from a chair in passing. “Time you were in bed.” They followed her to the kitchen and stood while she delved into the ice box and set food on the table, and a pitcher of milk, and drew a chair up.

“Fix him a toddy, Jenny,” old Bayard suggested. But Miss Jenny vetoed this immediately.

“Milk’s what he wants. I reckon he had to drink enough whisky during that war to last him for a while. Bayard used to never come home from his, without wanting to ride his horse up the front steps and into the house. Come on, now,” and she drove old Bayard firmly out of the kitchen and up the stairs. “You go on to bed, you hear? Let him alone for a while.” She saw his door shut and she entered young Bayard’s room and prepared his bed, and after a while from her own room she heard him mount the stairs.

His room too was treacherously illumined by the moon, and the old familiarity of it was sharp with ghosts that neither slept nor waked. Without turning on the light he went and sat on the bed. Outside the windows the interminable Crickets and frogs, as though the moon’s rays were thin glass impacting among the trees and shrubs and shattering in brittle musical rain upon the ground, and above this and with a deep timbrous quality, the measured respirations of the pump in the electric plant beyond the barn.

He dug another cigarette from his pocket and lit it. But he took only two draughts before he flung it away. And then he sat quietly in the room which he and John had shared in the young masculine violence of their twinship, on the bed where he and his wife had lain the last night of his leave, the night before he went back to England and thence out to the Front again, where John already Was. Beside him on the pillow the wild bronze flame of her hair was hushed now in the darkness, and she lay holding his arm with both hands against her breast while they talked quietly, soberly at last.

But he was not thinking of her then. When he thought of her who lay rigid in the dark beside him, holding his arm tightly between her breasts, it was only to be a little savagely ashamed of the heedless thing he had done to her. He was thinking of his brother whom he had not seen in over a year, thinking that in a month they would see one another again.

Nor was he thinking of her now, although the walls held, like a withered flower in a casket, the fragrance of that magical chaos in which they had briefly lived, tragic and transient as a blooming of honeysuckle. He was thinking of his dead brother; the spirit of their violent complementing days lay like a dust everywhere in the room, obliterating the scent of that other presence, stopping his breathing, and he went to the window and flung the sash crashing upward and leaned there, gulping air into his lungs like a man who has been submerged and who still cannot believe that he has reached the surface again.

Later, lying naked between the sheets, he waked himself with his own groaning. The room was filled now with a gray light, sourceless and chill, and he turned his head and saw Miss Jenny, the woolen shawl about her shoulders, sitting in a chair beside the bed.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“That’s what I want to know,” Miss Jenny answered. “You make more noise than that water pump.”

“I want a drink.”

Miss Jenny leaned forward and raised a glass from the floor beside her and extended it to him. Bayard had risen on his elbow. “I said a drink,” he said.

“You drink this milk, boy,” Miss Jenny commanded. “You think I’m going to sit up all night just to feed you whisky? Drink it, now.”

He took the glass and emptied it obediently and lay back. Miss Jenny set the glass on the floor.

“What time is it?”

“Hush,” she said She laid her hand on his brow. “Go to sleep.”

He rolled his head on the pillow, but he could not evade her hand

“Get away,” he said ‘”Let me alone.”

“Hush,” Miss Jenny said “Go to sleep.”

TWO

1

Simon said: “You ain’t never yit planted nothin’ whar hit ought ter be planted.” He sat on the bottom step, whetting the blade of his hoe with a file. Miss Jenny stood with her caller at the edge of the veranda above him, in a man’s felt hat and heavy gloves. A pair of shears dangled below her waist, glinting in the morning sunlight.

“And whose business is that?” she demanded. “Yours, or Colonel’s? Either one of you can loaf on this porch and tell me where a plant will grow best or look best, but if either of you ever grew as much as a weed out of the ground yourselves, I’d like to see it. I don’t give two whoops in the bad place where you or Colonel either thinks a flower ought to be planted; I plant my flowers just exactly where I want ‘em to be planted.”

“And den dares ‘um not ter come up,” Simon added. “Dat’s de way you en Isom gyardens. Thank de Lawd Isom ain’t got to make his livin’ wid de sort of gyardenin’ he learns in dat gyarden.”

Simon wore a disreputable hat, of a fabric these many years anonymous. Miss Jenny stared coldly down at this hat.

“Isom made his living by being born black,” Miss Jenny snapped. “Suppose you quit scraping at that hoe and see if you can’t dare some of the grass in that salvia bed to come up.”

“I got to git a aidge on dis curry-comb,’’ Simon said. “You go’n out dar to yo’ gyardem: I’ll git dis bed cleaned up.” He scraped steadily at the hoe-blade.

“You’ve been at that long enough to find out that you can’t possibly wear that blade down to the handle with just a file. You’ve been at it ever since breakfast. I heard you. You get out there where folks passing will think you’re working, anyhow.”

Simon groaned and spent a half minute laying the file aside. He laid it on one step, then he picked it up and moved it to another step. Then he laid it against the step behind him. Then he ran his thumb along the blade, examining it with morose hopefulness.

“Hit mought do now,” he said. “But hit’ll be jest like weedin’ wid a curry-c—”

“You try it, anyway,” Miss Jenny said. “Maybe the weeds’U think it’s a hoe. You go give ‘em a chance to, anyhow.”

“Ise gwine, Ise gwine,” Simon answered pettishly, rising and hobbling away. “You go’n see erbout dat place o’ yo’n; I’ll ‘tend to dis.”

Miss Jenny and the caller descended the steps and went on around the corner of the house.

“Why he’d rather sit there and rasp at that new hoe with a file instead of grubbing up a dozen weeds in that salvia bed, I can’t see,” Miss Jenny said. “But he’ll do it. He’d sit there and scrape at that hoe until it looked like a saw blade, if I’d let him. Bayard bought a lawn mower three or four years ago-—God knows what for—and turned it over to Simon. The folks that made it guaranteed it for a year. They didn’t know Simon, though. I often thought, reading about those devastations and things in the papers last year, what a good time Simon would have had in the war. He could have shown ‘em things about devastation they never thought of. Isom!” she shouted.

They entered the garden and Miss Jenny paused at the gate. “You, Isom!”

This time there was a reply, and Miss Jenny went on with her caller and Isom lounged up from somewhere and clicked the gate behind him.

“Why didn’t you—” Miss Jenny began, looking back over her shoulder, then she stopped and regarded Isom’s suddenly military figure with brief, cold astonishment. For Isom now wore khaki, with a divisional emblem on his shoulder and a tarnished service stripe on his cuff. And it didn’t fit him, or rather, it fitted him too well. His lean sixteen-year-old neck rose from the slovenly collar’s limp, overlarge embrace, and an astonishing amount of his wrists was viable beneath the cuffs. The breeches bagged hopelessly into the unskillful wrapping of the putties which, with either a fine sense for the unique or a bland disregard of military usage, he had donned prior to his shoes, and the soiled overseas cap came down most regrettably on his bullet head.

“Where did you get those clothes?” Miss Jenny’s shears dangled below her waist on a heavy black cord, glinting in the sun, and Miss Benbow in a white dress and a soft straw hat turned also and looked at him with a strange expression.

“Dey’s Caspey’s,” Isom answered. “I jes’ bor’d ‘um.”

“Caspey?” Miss Jenny repeated. “Is he home?”

“Yessum. He got in las’ night on de nine-thirty.”

“Last night, did he? Where is he now? Asleep, I reckon?”

“Yessum. Dat’s whar he wuz when I lef’ home.”

“And I reckon that’s how you borrowed his uniform,” Miss Jenny said tartly. “Well, let him sleep this morning. Give him a day to get over the war. But if it made a fool out of him like it did Bayard, he’d better put that thing on again and go back to it. I’ll declare, men can’t seem to stand anything.” She strode on, the other in her straight white dress followed.

“You are awfully hard on men, not to have a husband to worry with, Miss Jenny,” she said. “Besides, you’re judging all men by your Sartorises.”

“They ain’t my Sartorises,” Miss Jenny disclaimed promptly. “I just inherited ‘em. But you just wait; you’ll have one of your own to bother with soon; you just wait until Horace gets home, then see how long it takes him to get over it. Men can’t seem to stand anything,” she repeated “Can’t even stand helling around with no worry and no responsibility and no limit to all of the meanness they can think about wanting to do. Do you think a man could sit day after day and month after month in a house miles from anywhere and spend the time between casualty lists tearing up bedclothes and window curtains and table linen to make, lint and watching sugar and flour and meat dwindling away and using pine knots for light because there aren’t any candles and no candlesticks to put them in, if there were, and hiding in nigger cabins while -drunken Yankee generals set fire to the house your great-great-grandfather built and you and all your folks were born in? Don’t talk to me about men suffering in war.” Miss Jenny snipped larkspur savagely. “Just you wait until Horace comes home; then you’ll see. John at least had consideration enough after he’d gone and gotten himself into where he had no business, not to come back and worry everybody to death. But Bayard now, coming back in the middle of it and having everybody thinking he was settled down at last, teaching at that Memphis flying school, and then marrying that fool girl

“Miss Jenny!”

“Well, I don’t mean that, but she ought to’ve been spanked, hard. I know: didn’t I do the same tiling, myself? It was all that harness Bayard wore. Talk about men being taken in by a uniform!” Miss Jenny clipped larkspur. “Dragging me up there to the wedding, mind you, with a lot of rented swords and some of Bayard’s pupils trying to drop roses into the street. I reckon some of ‘em were not his pupils, because one of ‘em finally did drop a few that missed the houses.” Miss Jenny snipped larkspur savagely. “I had dinner with ‘em one night. Sat in the hotel an hour until they finally came for me. Then we stopped at a delicatessen and Bayard and Caroline got out and went inside and came back with about a bushel of packages and dumped ‘em into the car under my feet. That was the dinner I’d been invited to, mind you; there wasn’t a sign of anything that looked or smelt like a stove in the whole place. I didn’t offer to help ‘em. I told Caroline I didn’t know anything about that sort of house-keeping, because my folks were so old-fashioned they cooked food at our house.

“Then the others came in—some of Bayard’s soldier friends, and a herd of other folks’ wives, near as I could gather. Young women that ought to have been at home, seeing about supper, gabbling and screeching in that silly way young married women have when they’re doing something they hope their husbands wouldn’t like. They began to unwrap bottles—about a dozen, I reckon, and Bayard and Caroline came in with that silver I gave ‘em and monogrammed napkins and that delicatessen stuff that tasted like wet swamp grass, on paper plates. We ate it there, sitting on the floor tor standing up or just wherever you happened to be.

“That was Caroline’s idea of keeping house. She said they’d settle down when they got old. About thirty-five, I suppose she meant. Thin as a rail; there wouldn’t have been much to spank. But she’d ought to’ve had it, just the same. Soon as she found out about the baby, she named it Named it Bayard nine months before it was born and told everybody about it. Used to talk about it like it was her grandfather or something. Always saying Bayard won’t let me do this or that or the other.”

Miss Jenny continued to clip larkspur, the caller tall in a white dress beside her. The fine and huge simplicity of the house rose among its thickening trees, the garden lay in the sunlight bright with bloom, myriad with scent and with a drowsy humming of bees—a steady golden sound, as of sunlight become audible—all the impalpable veil of the immediate, the familiar; just beyond it a girl with a bronze skirling of hair and a small, supple body in a constant epicene unrepose, a dynamic fixation like that of carven sexless figures caught in moments of action, striving, a mechanism all of whose members must move in performing the most trivial action, her wild hands not accusing but, passionate sail beyond the veil impalpable but sufficient

Miss Jenny stooped over the bed of larkspur, her narrow back, though stooping, erect still, indomitable. A thrush flashed modestly across the bright air and into the magnolia tree in a dying parabola. “And then, when he bad to go back to the war, of course he brought her down here and left her on my hands.” The caller stood tall in her white dress, and Miss Jenny said: “No, I don’t mean that.” She snipped larkspur.

“Poor women,” she said. “I reckon we do have to take our revenge wherever and whenever we can get it. Only she ought to’ve taken it out on Bayard.”

“When she died,” Narcissa said, “and he couldn’t know about it; when he couldn’t have come to her if he had? And you can say that?”

“Bayafd love anybody, that cold brute?” Miss Jenny clipped larkspur: “He never cared a snap of his fingers for anybody in his life except Johnny.” She snipped larkspur savagely. “Swelling around here like it was our fault, like we made ‘em go to that war. And now he’s got to have an automobile, got to go all the way to Memphis to buy one. An automobile in Bayard Sartoris’ barn, mind you; him that won’t even lead the bank’s money to a man that owns one...Do you want some sweerpeas?”

“Yes, please,” the gues answered. Miss Jenny straightened up, then she stopped utterly still.

“Just look yonder, will you?” she said, pointing with hear shears. “That’s how they suffer from the war, poor things.” Beyond a frame of sweet peas Isom in his khaki strode solemnly back and forth. Upon his right shoulder was a hoe and on his face an expression of rapt absorption, and as he reversed at each end of his beat, he mumbled to himself in measured singsong. “You, Isom!” Miss Jenny shouted.

He halted in midstride, still at shoulder arms. “Ma’am?” he answered mildly. Miss Jenny continued to glare at him, and his military bearing faded and he lowered his piece and executed a sort of effacing movement within his martial shroud.

“Put that hoe down and bring that basket over here. That’s the first time in your life you ever picked up a garden tool of your own free will I wish I could discover the kind of uniform that would make you keep both hands on it; I’d certainly buy you one.”

“Yessum.”

“If you want to play soldier, you go off somewhere with Bayard and do it. I can raise flowers without any help from the army,” she added, turning to her guest with her handful of larkspur. “And what are you laughing at?” she demanded sharply.

“You both looked so funny,” the younger woman explained “You looked so much more like a soldier than poor Isom, for all his uniform.” She touched her eyes with her fingertips. “I’m sorry: please forgive me for laughing.”

“Hmph,” Miss Jenny sniffed. She put the larkspur into the basket and went on to the sweet pea frame and snipped again, viciously, ‘the guest followed, as did Isom with the basket; and presently Miss Jenny was done with sweet peas and she moved on again with her train, pausing to cut a rose here and there, and stopped before a bed where tulips lifted their bright bells. She and Isom had guessed happily, this time; the various colors formed an orderly pattern.

“When we dug ‘em up last fall” she told her guest, “I’d put a red one in Isom’s right hand and a white one in his left, and then I’d say ‘All right, Isom, give me the red one.’ He’d never fail to hold out his left hand, and if I just looked at him long enough, he’d hold out both hands. Didn’t I tell you to hold that red one in your right hand?’ I’d say. ‘Yessum, here ‘tis.’ And out would come his left hand again. That ain’t your right hand, stupid,’ I’d say. ‘Dat’s de one you said wuz my right hand a while ago,’ Mr. Isom says. Ain’t that so, nigger?” Miss Jenny glared at Isom, who again performed his deprecatory effacing movement behind the slow equanimity of his ivory grin.

“Yessum, I ‘speck it is.”

“You’d better,” Miss Jenny rejoined warningly. “Now, how can anybody keep a decent garden, with a fool like that? I expect every spring to find corn or lespedeza coming up in the hyacinth beds or something.” She examined the tulips again, weighing the balanced colors one against another in her mind. “No, you don’t want any tulips,” she decided briskly, moving on.

“No, Miss Jenny,” the guest agreed demurely. They went on to the gate, and Miss Jenny stopped again and took the basket from Isom.

“And you go home and take that thing off, you hear?” she told Isom.

“Yessum.”

“And I want to look out that window in a few minutes and see you in the garden with that hoe again,” she added. “And I want to see both of your right hands on it and I want to see it moving, too. You hear me?”

“Yessum.”

“And tell Caspey to be ready to go to work in the morning. Even niggers that eat here have got to work some.” But Isom was gone, and they went on and mounted the steps. “Don’t he sound like that’s exactly what he’s going to do?” she confided as they entered the hall. “He knows as well as I do that I won’t dare look out that window, after what I said. Come in,” she added, opening the parlor door.

This room was opened but seldom now, though in John Sartoris’ day it had been constantly in use. He was always giving dinners, and balls too on occasion, with the folding doors between it and the dining room thrown open and three negroes with stringed instruments ensconced on the stairway and all the candles burning. For with his frank love of pageantry, as well as his innate sociability, he liked to surround himself with an atmosphere of scent and delicate garments and food and music. He had lain also in this room in his grey regimentals and so brought to a conclusion the colorful, if not always untarnished, pageant of his own career; perhaps ghosts he knew greeted him there again and surrounded him as of old upon the jocund mellowness of his hearth.

But during Bayard’s time it was less and less in use, and slowly and imperceptibly it lost its jovial but stately masculinity, becoming by mutual and unspoken agreement a place for his wife and his son John’s wife and Miss Jenny to clean thoroughly twice a year and in which, preceded by a ritualistic unswaddling of brown holland, they entertained their more formal callers. This was its status up to the birth of his grandsons and the death of their parents, and it continued thus until his wife died. After that Miss Jenny bothered with formal callers but little and with the parlor not at all She said it gave her the creeps.

And so it stayed closed nearly all the time and slowly acquired an atmosphere of solemn and macabre fustiness and was referred to as the Parlor with a capital P. Occasionally young Bayard or John would open the door and peer into solemn obscurity in which the shrouded furniture loomed with a sort of ghostly benignance, like albino mastodons. But they did not enter; already in their minds the room was associated with death, an idea which even the holly and tinsel of Christmas tide could not completely obscure. They were away at school by the time they reached party age, but even during vacations, though they had filled the house with the polite bedlam of their contemporaries, the room would be opened only on Christmas eve. And after they had gone to England in ‘16 it was opened twice a year to be cleaned after the ancient ritual that even Simon had inherited from his forefathers, and to have the piano tuned or when Miss Jenny and Narcissa Benbow spent a forenoon or afternoon there, and formally not at all.

The furniture loomed shapelessly in its dun shrouds; the piano alone was uncovered, and the younger woman drew the bench up and removed her hat and let it slip to the floor beside her. Miss Jenny set her basket down and from the gloom beside the piano she drew a straight, hard chair, uncovered also, and sat down and removed her felt hat from her trim white head. Light came through the open door, and faintly through the heavy maroon-and-lace curtains, but it only served to enhance the obscurity and render more shapeless the hooded anonymous furniture.

But behind these dun bulks and in all the corners of the room there waited, as actors stand within the wings beside the waiting stage, figures in crinoline and hooped muslin and silk; in stocks and flowing coats; in grey too, with crimson sashes and sabres in gallant sheathed repose—Jeb Stuart himself perhaps, on his glittering garlanded bay or with his sunny hair falling upon fine broadcloth beneath the mistletoe and holly boughs of Baltimore in ‘58. Miss Jenny sat with her uncompromising grenadier’s back and held her hat upon her knees and fixed herself to look on. Narcissa’s white dress was pliant as light against the gloom and as serene, and her hands touched chords from the keyboard and drew them together and rolled the curtain back upon the scene.

In the kitchen Caspey was having breakfast while Simon his father, and Elnora his sister, and Isom his nephew (still wearing the uniform) watched him. He had been Simon’s: understudy in the stables and general handy-man about the place, doing all the work Simon managed, through the specious excuse of decrepitude, to slough off onto his shoulders and that Miss Jenny could devise for him and which he could not evade. Bayard Sartoris also employed him in the fields occasionally. Then the draft had got him and bore him to France and the St. Sulpice docks as one of a labor battalion, where he did what work corporals and sergeants managed to slough off onto his unmilitary shoulders and that white officers could devise for him and which he could not evade.

Thus all the labor about the place devolved upon Simon and Isom, but Miss Jenny kept Isom piddling about the garden so much of the time that Simon was soon as bitter- against- the. War Lords as any professional Democrat. Meanwhile Caspey was working a little and trifling with continental life in its martial mutations rather to his future detriment, for at last the tumult died and the captains departed and left a vacuum filled with the usual bitter bickering of Armageddon’s heirs-at-law; and Caspey returned to his native land a total loss, sociologically speaking, with a definite disinclination toward labor, honest or otherwise, and two honorable wounds incurred in a razor-hedged crap game. But return he did, to his father’s querulous satisfaction and Elnora’s and Isom’s admiration, and he now sat in the kitchen, telling them about the war.

“I don’t take nothin’ fum no white folks no mo’,” he was saying. “War done changed all dat. If us colored folks is good enough to save France fum de Germans, den us is good enough to have de same rights de Germans has. French folks thinks so, anyhow, and if America don’t, dey’s ways of learnin’ ‘um. Yes, suh, it wuz de colored soldier saved France and America bofe. Black regiments kilt mo’ Germans dan all de white armies put together, let ‘lone un-loadin’steamboats all day long fer a dollar a day.”

“War ain’t hurt dat big mouf o’ yo’n, anyhow,” Simon said.

“War unloosed de black man’s mouf,” Caspey corrected. “Give him de right to talk. Kill Germans, den do yo’ oratin’, dey tole us. Well, us done it.”

“How many you kilt, Unc’ Caspey?” Isom asked deferentially.

“I ain’t never bothered to count ‘um up. Been times I kilt mo’ in one mawnin’ dan dey’s folks on dis whole place. One time we wuz down in de cellar of a steamboat tied up to de bank, and one of dese sub-mareems sailed up and stopped by de boat, and all de white officers run up on de bank and hid. Us boys didn’t know dey wuz anything wrong ‘twell folks started clambin’ down de ladder. We never had no guns wid us at de time, so when we seed dem green legs comin’ down de ladder we crope up to de een of de ladder, and as dey come down one of de boys would hit ‘um over de haid wid a stick of wood an another would drag ‘um outen de way and cut dey th’oat wid a razor. Dey wuz about thirty of ‘um…Elnora, is dey any mo’ of dat coffee lef’ ?”

“Sho,” Simon murmured. Isom’s eyes popped quietly and Elnora removed the coffee pot from the stove and refilled Caspey’s cup.

Caspey drank coffee for a moment. “And another time me and a boy wuz gwine along a road. We got tired unloadin’ steamboats all day long, so one day de Captain’s dog-robber foun’ whar he kep’ dese here unloaded passes and he took a hanful of ‘um, and me and him wuz on de road to town when a truck come along and de boy axed us did us want a lif. He wuz a school boy, so he writ on three of de passes whenever we come to a place dat mought be M.P. invested, and we got along fine, ridin’ about de country oil dat private truck, ‘twell one mawnin’ we looked out whar de truck wuz and dey wuz a M.P. settin’ on de seat whilst de truck boy wuz tryin’ to explain to him. So we turned de other way and lit out walkin’. After dat we had to dodge de M.P. towns, ‘case me and de other boy couldn’t write on de passes.

“One day we wuz gwine along a road. It wuz a busted-up road and it didn’t look much like M.P. country, but dey wuz some of ‘um in de las’ town us dodged, so we didn’t know us wuz so close to whar de fightin’ wuz gwine on ‘twell we turned a corner onto a bridge and come right onto a whole regiment of Germans, swimmin’ in de river. Dey seed us about de same time we seed dem and dived under de water, and me and de other boy grabbed up two machine guns settin’ dar and we sot on de bridge rail, and ev’y time a German stuck his haid up to take a new breaf, us shot him. It wuz jes’ like shoorin’ turkles in a slough. I reckon dey wuz clost to a hundred us kilt befo’ de machine guns run dry. Dat’s whut de Captain give me dis fer.” He drew from his pocket a florid plated medal of Porto Rican origin, and Isom came quietly up to see it.

“Umumuh,” Simon said. He sat with his hands on his knees, watching his son with rapt astonishment. Elnora came up to see also, with her arms daubed with flour.

“Whut does dey look like?” Elnora asked. “Like folks?”

“Dey’s big,” Caspey answered. “Sort of pink lookin’ and about eight foot tall. Only folks in de whole American war dat could handle ‘um wuz de colored regiments.” Isom returned to his corner beside the woodbox.

“Ain’t you got some gyardenin’ to do, boy?” Simon demanded of him.

“Naw, suh,” Isom answered, his enraptured gaze still on his uncle. “Miss Jenny says us done caught up dis mawnin’.”

“Well, don’t you come whinin’ to me when she jumps on you,” Simon warned him. “Whar did you kill de nex’ lot?” he asked his son.

“We didn’t kill no mo’ after dat,” Caspey answered. “We decided dat wuz enough and dat we better leave de rest of ‘um fer de boys dat wuz gittdn’ paid fer killin’ ‘um. We went on ‘twell de road played out in a field. Dey wuz some ditches and ole wire fences and holes in de field, wid folks livin’ in ‘um. De folks wuz white American soldiers and dey egvised us to pick us out a hole and stay dere fer a while, if us wanted de peace and comfort of de war. So we picked out a dry hole and moved in. Dey wasn’t nothin’ to do all day long but lay in de shade and watch de air balloons and listen to de shootin’ about fo’ miles up de road. De white boys could write, so dey fixed up de passes and we took time about gwine up to whar de army wuz and gittin’ grub. When de passes give out we found whar a French army wid some cannons was livin’ over in de woods a ways, so we went over whar dey wuz and got grub.

“Dat went on fer a long time, ‘twell one day de balloons wuz gone and de white boys says it wuz time to move again. But we didn’t see no use in gwine no whar else, so we stayed, me and de other colored boy. Dat evenin, we went over to whar de French army wuz fer some grub, but dey wuz gone too. De boy wid me says maybe de Germans done caught ‘um, but we didn’t know; hadn’t heard no big racket since yistiddy. So we went back to de cave. Dey wasn’t no grub, so we crawled in and went to bed and slep’ dat night, and early de nex’ mawnin’ somebody come into de hole and tromped on us and we woke up. It wuz one of dese army upliftin’ ladies huntin’ German bayonets and belt-buckles. She says Who dat in here?’ and de boy wid me says ‘Us shock troops.’ So we got out, but we hadn’t gone no piece befo’ here come a wagon-load of M.P.s And de passes had done give out.”

“Whut you do den?” Simon asked. Isom’s eyes bulged quietly in the gloom behind the woodbox.

“Dey taken and shut us up in de jail-house fer a while. But de war wuz mos’ thu’ and dey needed us to load dem steamboats back up, so dey sont us to a town name’ Bres,...I don’t take nothin’ offen no white man, M.P. er not,” Caspey stated again. “Us boys wuz in a room one night, shootin’ dice. De bugle had done already played de lights out tone, but we wuz in de army, whar a man kin do whut he wants as long as dey’ll let him, so when de M.P. come along and says “Put out dat light,’ one of de boys says ‘Come in here, and we’ll put yo’n out.’ Dey wuz two of de M.P.s and dey kicked de do’ in and started shootin’, and somebody knocked de light over and we run. Dey foun’ one of de M.P.s de nex’ mawnin’ widout nothin’ to hole his collar on, and two of de boys wuz dead, too. But dey couldn’t fin’ who de rest of us wuz. And den we come home.”

Caspey emptied his cup. “I don’t take nothin’ offen no white man no mo’, lootenant ner captain ner M.P. War showed de white folks dey can’t git along widout de colored man. Tromple him in de dust, but when de trouble bust loose, hit’s ‘Please, suh, Mr. Colored Man; right dis way whar de bugle blowin’, Mr. Colored Man; you is de savior of de country.’ And now de colored race gwine reap de benefits of de war, and dat soon.”

“Sho,” said Simon, impressed.

“Yes, suh. And de women, too. I got my white in France, and I’m gwine git it here, too.”

“Lemme tell you somethin, nigger,” Simon said, “de good Lawd done took keer of you fer a long time now, but He ain’t gwine bother wid you always.”

“Den I reckon I’ll git along widout Him,” Caspey retorted. He rose and stretched. “Reckon I’ll go down to de big road and ketch a ride into town. Gimme dem clothes, Isom.”

Miss Jenny and her guest stood on the veranda when he passed along beside the house and crossed the lawn toward the drive.

“There goes your gardener,” Narcissa said. Miss Jenny looked.

“That’s Caspey,” she corrected. “Now, where do you reckon he’s headed? Town, I’ll bet a dollar,” she added, watching his lounging khaki back, by means of which he contrived in some way to disseminate a sort of lazy insolence. “You, Caspey!”