Flags in the Dust

THREE

1

Horace Benbow in his clean, wretchedly fitting khaki which but served to accentuate his air of fine and delicate futility, and laden with an astonishing impedimenta of knapsacks and kitbags and paper-wrapped parcels, got off the two-thirty train. His sister called to him across the tight clotting of descending and ascending passengers, and he roved his distraught gaze like a somnambulist rousing with an effort to avoid traffic, about the agglomerate faces. “Hello, hello,” he said, then he thrust himself clear and laid his bags and parcels on the edge of the platform and moved with intent haste up the train toward the baggage ear.

“Horace!” his sister called again, running after him. The station agent emerged from his office and stopped him and held him like a finely bred restive horse and shook his hand, and thus his sister overtook him. He turned at her voice and came completely from out his distraction and swept her up in his arms until her feet were off the ground, and kissed her on the mouth.

“Dear old Narcy,” he said, kissing her again. Then he set her down and stroked his hands on her face, as a child would. “Dear old Narcy,” he repeated, touching her face with his fine spatulate hands, gazing at her as though he were drinking that constant serenity of hers through his eyes. He continued to repeat Dear old Narcy, stroking his hands on her face, utterly oblivious of his surroundings until she recalled him.

“Where in the world are you going, up this way?”

Then he remembered, and released her and rushed on, she following, and stopped again at the door of the baggage car, from which the station porter and a trainband were taking trunks and boxes as the baggage clerk tilted them out.

“Can’t you send down for it?” she asked. But he stood peering into the car, oblivious of her again. The two negroes returned and he stepped aside, still looking into the car with peering, birdlike motions of his head. “Let’s send back for it,” his sister said again.

“What? Oh. I’ve seen it every time I changed cars,” he told her, completely forgetting the sense of her words. “It’d be rotten luck to have it go astray right at my doorstep, wouldn’t it?” Again the negroes moved away with a trunk, and he stepped forward again and peered into the car. “That’s just about what happened to it; some clerk forgot to put it on the.train at M—. There it is,” he interrupted himself. “Easy now, cap,” he called in the country idiom, in a fever of alarm as the clerk slammed into the door a box of foreign shape and stenciled with a military address. “She’s got glass in her.”

“All right, colonel,” the baggage clerk agreed, “we ain’t hurt her none, I reckon. If we have, all you got to do is sue us.” The two negroes backed up to the door and Horace laid his delicate impractical hands on the box as the clerk tilted it expertly outward.

“Easy now, boys,” he repeated nervously, and he trotted beside them to the platform. “Set it down easy, now. Here, sis, lend a hand, will you?”

“We got it all right, cap’m,” the station porter said. “We ain’t gwine drop it,” But Horace continued to dab at it with his, hands, and as they set it down he leaned his head to it, listening. “She’s all right on de inside, ain’t she?”

“It’s all right,” the train porter assured him. He turned away. “Let’s go,” he called.

“I think it’s all right,” Horace agreed, his ear against the box, “I don’t hear anything. It’s packed pretty well” The engine blew two blasts and Horace sprang erect, digging into his pocket, and ran to the moving cars. The porter was just closing the vestibule, but he leaned down to Horace’s extended hand and straightened up and touched his cap. Horace returned to his box and gave another coin to the station porter. “Put it inside for me, careful, now. I’ll be back for it soon.”

“Yes, suh, Mr. Benbow. I’ll look out fer it”

“I thought it was lost, once,” he confided, dipping his arm inside his sister’s, and they retraced their steps toward the car. “It was delayed at Brest and didn’t come until the next boat. I had the first outfit I got—a small one—with me, and I pretty near lost that one, too. I was blowing a small one in my cabin on the boat one afternoon, when the whole thing, cabin and all, took fire. The captain decided that I’d better not try it again until we got ashore, with all the men on board. The vase turned out pretty well, though,” he babbled. “Lovely little thing. I’m catching on; I really am. Venice is a lovely place,” he added. “Must take you there, some day.” Then he squeezed her arm and fell to repeating Dear old Narcy, as though the homely sound of the nickname on his tongue was a taste he loved and had not forgotten. A few people still lingered about the station. Some of them spoke to him and he stopped to shake their hands, and a marine private with the Second Division Indian head on his shoulder remarked the triangle on Horace’s sleeve and made a vulgar sound of derogation through his pursed lips.

“Howdy, buddy,” Horace said, turning upon the other his shy startled gaze.

“Evenin’, general,” the marine answered. He spat, not exactly at Horace’s feet, and not exactly anywhere else. Narcissa clamped her brother’s arm against her side with her elbow.

“Do come on home and get into some decent clothes,” she said in a lower tone, hurrying him along.

“Get out of uniform?” he said. “I rather fancied myself in khaki,” he said, a little hurt “You really think I am ridiculous in this?” he asked quietly.

“Of course not,” she answered immediately, squeezing his hand. “I’m sorry I said that. You wear it just as long as you want to.”

“It’s a good uniform,” he said soberly. “People will realize that in about ten years, when noncombatants’ hysteria has worn itself out and the individual soldiers realize that the A.E.F. didn’t invent disillusion.”

“What did it invent?” she asked, holding his arm against her, surrounding him with the fond, inattentive serenity of her affection.

“God knows...Dear old Narcy,” he said again, and they crossed the side track and approached her car. “So you have dulled your palate for khaki.”

“Of course not,” she answered, shaking his arm a little. “You wear it just as long as you want to.” She opened the car door. Someone called after them-and they looked back and saw the porter trotting after them with Horace’s hand-luggage, which he had walked off and left lying on the platform.

“Oh, Lord,” Horace said, “I worry with it for four thousand miles, then lose it on my own doorstep. Much obliged, Sol.” He extended his hands, but the porter came up and stowed the things in the car. “That’s the first outfit I got,” he added to his sister. “And the vase I blew on shipboard. I’ll show it to you when we get home.”

His sister got in under the wheel. “Where are your clothes? In the box?”

“I haven’t got any. Had to throw most of ‘em away to make room for the other stuff. No room for anything else.”

Narcissa looked at him for a moment with fond fretted annoyance. “What’s the matter?” he asked innocently. “Forget something yourself?”

“No. Get in. Aunt Sally’s waiting to see you.”

They drove on and mounted the shady gradual hill toward the square, and Horace looked about happily upon familiar quiet scenes. Some new tight little houses with minimum of lawn—homes built by country-bred people and set close to the street after the country fashion; occasionally a house going up on a lot that was vacant sixteen months ago when he went away. Other streets stretched away, shadier, with houses a little older and a little more imposing as they got away from the station’s vicinity; and pedestrians, usually old men bound townward after their naps, to spend the afternoon in grave futile absorptions.

The hill flattened away into the plateau on which the town proper had been built these hundred and more years ago, and the street became definitely urban presently with garages and small new shops with merchants in shirt-sleeves and customers; the picture show with its lobby plastered with life in colored lithographic mutations. Then the square, with its unbroken low skyline of old weathered brick and fading dead names stubborn yet beneath the superimposed recenter ones, and drifting negroes in casual o.d. garments worn by both sexes and country people in occasional khaki too; and their more brisk urban brethren weaving among their placid chewing unhaste and among the sitting groups in chairs before certain stores.

The courthouse was of brick top, with stone arches rising among elms, and among the trees the monument of the Confederate soldier stood like a white candle. Beneath the porticos of the courthouse and upon benches about the green, the city fathers sat and talked and drowsed, in uniform too, now and then. But it was the grey of Jackson and Beauregard and Johnston, and they sat in a sedate gravity of minor political sinecures, murmuring and smoking and spitting about unhurried checker-boards. When the weather was bad they moved inside to the circuit clerk’s office.

It was here that the young men loafed also, pitching dollars or tossing baseballs back and forth or lying on the grass until the young girls in their little colored dresses and cheap nostalgic perfume came trooping down town through the late afternoon to the drug store. When the weather was bad the young men loafed in the drug stores or in the barber shop.

“Lots of uniforms yet,” Horace said. “All be home by June. Have the Sartoris boys come home yet?”

“John is dead,” his sister answered. “Didn’t you know?”

“No,” he answered quickly, with swift concern. “Poor old Bayard. Rotten luck they have. Funny family. Always going to wars, and always getting killed. And Bayard’s wife died, you wrote me.”

“Yes. But Bayard’s here. He’s got a racing automobile and he spends all his time tearing around the country. We are expecting every day to hear he’s killed himself in it.”

“Poor devil,” Horace said, and again: “Poor old Colonel He used to hate an automobile like a snake. Wonder what he thinks about it.”

“He goes with him.”

“What? Old Bayard in a motor car?”

“Yes, Miss Jenny says it’s to keep Bayard from breaking his fool neck. But she says Colonel Sartoris doesn’t know it, but that Bayard would just as soon break both their necks. That he probably will before he’s done.” She drove on across the square, among tethered wagons and cars parked casually and without order. “I hate Bayard Sartoris,” she said with sudden vehemence. “I hate all men.” Horace looked at her quickly.

“What’s the matter? What’s Bayard done to you? No, that’s backward. What have you done to Bayard?” But she didn’t answer. She turned into another street bordered by negro stores of one story and shaded by metal awnings beneath which negroes lounged, skinning bananas or small florid cartons of sweet cakes; and then a grist mill driven by a spasmodic gasoline engine. It oozed chaff and a sifting dust mote-like in the sun, and above the door a tediously hand-lettered sign: W.C. BEARDS MILL. Between it and a shuttered and silent gin draped with feathery soiled festoons of old lint, an anvil clanged at the end of a Short lane filled with wagons and horses and mules, and shaded by mulberry trees beneath which countrymen in overalls squatted “He ought to have more consideration for the old fellow than that,” Horace said fretfully, “Still, they’ve just gone through with an experience that pretty well shook the verities and the humanities, and whether they know it or not, they’ve got another one ahead of ‘em that’ll finish the business. Give him a little time...But I personally can’t see why they don’t let him go ahead and kill himself, if that’s what he wants. Sorry for Miss Jenny, though.”

“Yes,” his sister agreed, quietly again, “they’re worried about Colonel Sartoris’ heart, too. Everybody except him and Bayard, that is. I’m glad I have you instead of one of those Sartorises, Horry.” She laid her hand quickly and lightly on his thin knee.

“Dear old Narcy,” he said, then his face clouded again. “Damn scoundrel,” he said. “Well, it’s their trouble. How’s Aunt Sally been?”

“All right.” And then: “I am glad you’re home again.”

The shabby small shops were behind, and now the street opened away between old shady lawns, spacious and quiet. These homes were quite old, in actuality, or appearance at least, and, set well back from the street and its dust, they emanated a gracious and benign peace, steadfast as a windless afternoon in a world without motion or sound. Horace looked about him and drew a long breath.

“Perhaps this is the reason for wars,” he said. “The meaning of peace.”

The meaning of peace. They turned into an intersecting street narrower but more shady and even quieter, with a golden Arcadian drowse, and drove through a gate in a honeysuckle-covered fence of iron pickets. From the gate the cinder-packed drive rose in a grave curve between cedars. The cedars had been set out by an English architect of the ‘forties, who had built the house (with the minor concession of a veranda) in the funereal light Tudor which the young Victoria had sanctioned; and beneath and among them, even on the brightest days, lay a resinous exhilarating gloom, Mockingbirds loved them, and catbirds, and thrushes demurely mellifluous in the late afternoon; but the grass beneath them was sparse or not at all and there were no insects save fireflies in the dusk.

The drive ascended to the house and curved before it and descended again to the street in an unbroken arc of cedars Within the arc rose a lone oak tree, broad and huge and low; around its trunk ran a wooden bench. About this halfmoon of lawn and without the arc of the drive, were bridal wreath and crepe-myrtle bushes old as time, and huge as age, would make them. Big as trees they were, and in one fence corner was an astonishing clump of stunted banana palms and in the other a lantana with its clotted wounds, which Francis Benbow had brought home from Barbados in a tophat box in’71.

About the oak and from the funereal scimitar of the drive, lawn flowed streetward with good sward broken by random clumps of jonquil and narcissus and gladiolus. Originally the lawn was in terraces and the flowers constituted a formal bed on the first terrace. Then Will Benbow, Horace and Narcissa’s father, had had the terraces obliterated. It was done with plows and scrapers and the lawn was seeded anew with grass, and he had supposed the flower bed destroyed. But the next spring the scattered bulbs sprouted again, and now every year the lawn was stippled with bloom in yellow, white and pink without order. Neighbors’ children played quietly beneath the cedars, and a certain few young girls asked and received permission to pick some of the flowers each spring. At the top of the drive, where it curved away descending again, sat the brick doll’s house in which Horace and Narcissa lived, surrounded always by that cool, faintly-stringent odor of cedar trees.

It was trimmed with white and it had mullioned casements brought out from England; along the veranda eaves and above the door grew a wisteria vine like heavy tarred rope and thicker than a man’s wrist. The lower casements stood open upon gently billowing curtains of white dimity; upon the sill you expected to see a scrubbed wooden bowl, or at least an immaculate and supercilious cat. But the window all held only a wicker work basket from which, like a drooping poinsettia, spilled an end of patchwork in crimson and white; and in the doorway Aunt Sally, a potty little woman in a lace cap, leaned upon a gold-headed ebony walking-stick.

Just as it should be, and Horace turned and looked back at his aster crossing the drive with the parcels he had forgotten again. The meaning of peace.

He banged and splashed happily in his bathroom, shouting through the door to his sister where she sat on his bed. His discarded khaki lay upon a chair, holding yet through long association, in its harsh drab folds, something of life taut and delicate futility. On the old marble-topped dresser lay the crucible and tubes of his glass-blowing outfit, the first one he had bought, and beside it the vase he had blown on shipboard—a small chaste shape in clear glass not four inches high, fragile as a silver lily and incomplete.

“They work in caves,” he was shouting through the door, “down flights of stairs underground. You feel water seeping under your foot while you are reaching for the next step, and when you put your hand out to steady yourself against the wall, it’s wet when you take it away. It feels just like blood”

“Horace!”

“Yes, magnificent And way ahead you see the glow. All of a sudden the tunnel comes glimmering out of nothing, then you see the furnace, with things rising and falling in front of it, cutting the light off, and the walls go glimmering again. At first they’re just shapeless things hunching about. Antic, with shadows on the wet walls, red shadows; a dull red gleam, and black shapes like cardboard cut-outs rising and falling like a magic-lantern shutter. And then a face comes out, blowing, and the other faces sort of swell out of the red dark like painted balloons.

“And the things themselves! Sheerly and tragically beautiful. Like preserved flowers, you know. Macabre and inviolate; purged and purified as bronze, yet fragile as soap bubbles. Sound of pipes crystallized. Flutes and oboes, but mostly reeds. Oaten reeds. Dammit, they bloom like flowers right before your eyes. Midsummer night’s dream to a salamander.” His voice became unintelligible, soaring into phrases which she did not herself recognize, but from the pitch of his voice she knew were Milton’s archangels in their sonorous plunging ruin.

Presently he emerged, in a white shirt and serge trousers but still borne aloft on his flaming verbal wings, and while his voice chanted in measured syllables she fetched a pair of shoes from the closet, and while she stood holding the shoes, he ceased and touched her face again with his hands after that fashion of a child.

At supper Aunt Sally broke into his staccato babbling.

“Did you bring your Snopes back with yon?” she asked. This Snopes was a young man, member of a seemingly inexhaustible family which for the last ten or twelve years had been moving to town in driblets from a small settlement known as Frenchman’s Bend. Flem, the first Snopes, had appeared unheralded one day and without making a ripple in the town’s life, behind the counter of a small restaurant on a side street, patronized by country people. With this foothold and like Abraham of old, he led his family piece by piece into town. Flem himself was presently manager of the city light and water plant, and for the following few years he was a sort of handy-man to the city government; and three years ago, to old Bayard Sartoris’ profane surprise and unconcealed disapproval, he became vice-president of the Sartoris bank, where already a relation of his was a bookkeeper.

He still retained the restaurant, and the canvas tent in the rear of it in which he and his wife and baby had passed the first few months of their residence in town, and It served as an alighting-place for incoming Snopeses, from which they spread to small third-rate businesses of various kinds—grocery stores, barber shops (there was one, an invalid of some sort, with a second-hand peanut parcher)— where they multiplied and flourished. The older residents, from their Jeffersonian houses and genteel stores and offices, looked on with amusement at first But this was long since become something like consternation.

The Snopes to which Aunt Sally referred was named Montgomery Ward and he had just turned twenty-one in ‘17, and just before the draft law went into effect he applied to a recruiting officer in Memphis and was turned down because of his heart. Later, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, particularly that of Horace Benbow’s friends, he departed with Horace to a position in the YJV1GA. Later still it was told of him that he had travelled all the way to Memphis on that day he offered himself for service, with a plug of chewing tobacco beneath his left armpit But he and his patron had already gone when that story got out

“Did you bring your Snopes back with you?” Aunt Sally asked.

“No,” he answered, and his thin, nerve-sick face clouded with a fine cold distaste. “I was very much disappointed in him. I don’t even care to talk about

“Anybody could have told you that when you left,” Aunt Sally said, chewing slowly above her plate. Horace brooded for a moment, his thin hand tightened slowly about his fork.

“Ifs individuals like that, parasites—” he began, but his sister interrupted,

“Who cares about an old Snopes, anyway?” she said. “Besides, it’s too late at night to talk about the horrors of war.” Aunt Sally made a moist sound through her food, of vindicated superiority.

“It’s the generals they have nowadays,” she said. “General Johnston or General Forrest wouldn’t have took a Snopes in his army.” Aunt Sally was no relation at all She lived next door but one with two maiden sisters, one younger and one older than she. She had been in and out of the house ever since Horace and Narcissa could remember, having arrogated to herself certain rights in their lives before they could walk; rights which were never expressed and which she never availed herself of, yet the mutual understanding of which she never permitted to fall into desuetude. She would walk into any of the rooms unannounced, and she liked to talk tediously and a little tactlessly of Horace’s and Narcissa’s infantile ailments. It was said that she had once ‘made eyes’ at Will Benbow although she was a woman of thirty-four or -five when Will married; and she still spoke of him with a faintly disparaging possessive-ness, and of his wife she spoke nicely, too. “Julia was a right sweet-natured girl,” Aunt Sally would say.

So when Horace went off to the war Aunt Sally moved over to keep Narcissa company: no other arrangement had ever occurred to any one of the three of them. Aunt Sally was a good old soul, but she lived much in the past, shutting her intelligence with a bland finality to anything which had occurred since 1’01. For her, time had gone out drawn by horses, and into her stubborn and placid vacuum the squealing of automobile brakes had never penetrated. Aunt Sally had a lot of the crudities which old people are entitled to. She liked the sound of her own voice and she didn’t like to be alone in the house after dark, and as she had never got accustomed to her false teeth and so never touched them other than to change occasionally the water in which they sat, she ate unprettily of unprepossessing but easily malleable foods. Narcissa reached her hand beneath the table and squeezed her brother’s knee.

“I am glad you’re home, Horry.”

He looked at her quickly, and the cloud faded from his face as suddenly as it had come, and he let himself slip, as into water, into the constant serenity of her affection again.

He was a lawyer, principally through a sense of duty to the family tradition, and though he had no particular affinity to it other than a love for printed words, for the dwelling-places of books, he contemplated returning to his musty office with a glow of...not eagerness: no; of deep and abiding unreluctance, almost of pleasure. The meaning of peace. Old unchanging days; unwinged, perhaps, but undisastrous, too. You don’t see it, feel it, save with perspective. Fireflies had not yet come, and the cedars flowed unbroken on either hand down to the street, like a curving ebony wave with rigid un-breaking crests pointed on the sky. Light fell outward from the casement, across the porch and upon a bed of cannas, hardy, bronze-like—none of your flower-like fragility, theirs; and within the room Aunt Sally’s quavering monotone, Narcissa was there too, beside the lamp with a book, filling the room with her still and constant presence like the odor of jasmine, watching the door; and Horace stood on the dark veranda with his cold pipe, surrounded by that cool, faintly-stringent scent of cedar trees like another presence. The meaning of peace, he said to himself again, releasing the grave words one by one within the cool bell of silence into which he bad come at last again, hearing them linger with a dying fall pure as silver and crystal struck lightly together.

“How’s Belle?” he asked on the evening of his arrival home.

“They’re all right,” his sister answered. ‘They have a new car.”

“Dare say,” Horace agreed with detachment. The war should certainly have accomplished that much.” Aunt Sally had left them at last and tapped her slow bedward way. Horace stretched his serge legs luxuriously and for a while he ceased striking matches to his stubborn pipe and sat watching his sister’s dark head bent above the magazine upon her knees, lost from lesser and inconstant things. Her hair was smoother than “any reposing wings, sweeping with burnished unrebellion to a simple knot low on her neck? “Belle’s a rotten correspondent,” he added. “Like all women.”

She turned a pale, without looking up. “Did you write to her often?’

“It’s because they realize that letters are only good to bridge intervals between actions, like the interludes in Shakespeare’s plays,” he went on, oblivious. “And did you ever know a woman who read Shakespeare without skipping the interludes? Shakespeare himself knew that, so he didn’t put any women in the interludes. Let the men bombast to one another’s echoes while the ladies were backstage washing the dinner dishes or putting the children to bed’’

“I never knew a woman who read Shakespeare,” Narcissa corrected. “He talks too much.”

Horace rose and stood above her and patted her dark head.

“O profundity,” he said. “You have reduced all wisdom to a phrase, arid measured your sex by the stature of a star.”

“Well, they don’t,” she repeated, raising her head.

“No? why don’t they?” He struck another match to his pipe, watching her across his cupped hands as gravely and with poised eagerness, like a striking bird. “Your Arlens and Sabatinis talk a lot, and nobody ever had more to say and more trouble saying it than old Dreiser.”

“But they have secrets,” she explained. ‘‘Shakespeare doesn’t have any secrets. He tells everything.”

“I see. Shakespeare had no sense of discrimination and no instinct for reticence. In other words, he wasn’t a gentleman,” he suggested.

“Yes...That’s what I mean.”

“And so, to be a gentleman, you must have secrets.”

“Oh, you make me tired.” She returned to her magazine and he sat beside her on the couch and took her hand in his and stroked it upon his cheek and upon the fine devastation of his hair.

“It’s like walking through a twilit garden,” he said happily. “The flowers you know are all there, in their1 shifts and with their hair combed out for the night, but you know all of them. So you don’t bother ‘em, you just walk on and sort of stop and turn over a leaf occasionally, a leaf you didn’t notice before; perhaps you find a violet under it, or a bluebell or a lightning bug; perhaps only another leaf or a blade of grass. But there’s always a drop of dew on it.” He continued to stroke her hand upon his face. With her other hand she turned the magazine slowly on, listening to him with her fond serene detachment.

“Did you write to Belle often?” she repeated. “What did you say to her?”

“I wrote what she wanted to read. What all women want in letters. People are really entitled to half of what they think they ought to have, you know.”

“What did you tell her?” Narcissa persisted, turning the pages slowly, without looking up, her passive hand in his, following the stroking movement of his.

“I told her I was unhappy. Perhaps I was,” he added. His sister freed her hand quietly and laid it on the page. He said: “I admire Belle. She’s so cannily stupid. Once I feared her. Perhaps...No, I do’nt. I am immune to destruction: I have a magic. Which is a good sign that I am due for it, say the sages,” he added lightly. “But then, acquired wisdom is a dry-thing; it has a way of crumbling to dust where a sheer and blind coursing of stupid sap is impervious.” He sat without touching her, in a rapt and instantaneous repose. “Not like yours, O Serene,” he said, waking again. Then he fell to saying Dear old Narcy, and again he took her hand. It did not withdraw; neither did it wholly surrender.

“I don’t think you ought to say I’m dull so often, Horry,” she said soberly.

“Neither do I,” he agreed. “But I must take some sort of revenge on perfection.”

Later she lay in her dark room. Across the corridor Aunt Sally snored with placid regularity; in the adjoining room Horace lay while that wild fantastic futility of his voyaged in lonely regions of its own beyond the moon, about meadows nailed with firmamented stars to the ultimate roof of things, where unicorns filled the neighing air with galloping, or grazed or lay supine in latent and golden-hooved repose.

Horace was seven when she had been born. In the background of her sober babyhood were three beings whose lives and conduct she had adopted with rapt intensity—a lad with a wild thin face and an unflagging aptitude for tribulation; a darkly gallant shape romantic with smuggled edibles and with strong hard hands smelling always of a certain thrilling carbolic soap—a being something like Omnipotence but without awesomeness; and lastly, a gentle figure without legs or any inference of locomotion, like a minor shrine, surrounded always by an aura of gentle melancholy and an endless delicate manipulation of colored silken thread. This last figure was constant with a gentle and melancholy unassertion; the second revolved in an orbit which bore it at regular intervals into outer space, then returned it with its strong and jolly virility into her intense world again; but the first she had made her own by a sober and maternal perseverance. And so by the time she was five or six, people coerced Horace by threatening to tell Narcissa on him.

Julia Benbow died genteelly and irreproachably when Narcissa was seven and Horace fourteen, had been removed from their lives as a small sachet of lavender is removed from a chest of linen, leaving a delicate lingering impalpability; and slept now amid pointed cedars and doves and serene marble shapes. Thus Narcissa acquired two masculine destinies to control and shape, and through the intense maturity of seven and eight and nine she cajoled and threatened and commanded and (very occasionally) stormed them into concurrence. And so through fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, while Horace was first at Sewanee and later at Oxford. Then Will Benbow’s time came, and he joined his wife Julia among the marbles and the cedars and the doves, and the current of her maternalism had now but a single channel. For a time this current was dammed by a stupid mischancing of human affairs, but now Horace was home again and lay now beneath the same roof and the same recurrence of days, and the channel was undammed again.

“Why don’t you marry, and let that baby look after . himself for a while?” Miss Jenny Du Pre had demanded once, in her cold, abrupt way. Perhaps when she too was eighty, all men would be Sartorises to her, also. But that was a long time away. Sartorises. She thought of Bayard, but briefly, and without any tremor at all. He was now no more than the shadow of a hawk’s flight mirrored fleetingly by the windless surface of pool, and gone; where, the pool knew and cared not, leaving no stain.

2

He settled into the routine of days between office and home. The musty, solemn familiarity of calf-bound and never-violated volumes on whose dusty bindings prints of Will Benbow’s dead fingers could yet have been found; a little tennis in the afternoons, usually on Harry Mitchell’s fine court; cards in the evenings, also with Belle and Harry usually, or again and better still, with the ever accessible and never-failing magic of printed pages while his sister beyond the lamp from rum filled the room with that constant untroubling serenity of hers in which his spirit drowsed like a swimmer on a tideless summer sea.

Aunt Sally had returned home, with her bag of colored scraps and her false teeth, leaving behind her a fixed impalpability of a nebulous but definite obligation conferred at some personal sacrifice, as was her way, and a faint odor of old female flesh which faded from the rooms slowly, lingering yet in unexpected places, so that at times Narcissa, waking and lying for a while in the darkness, in the sensuous pleasure of having Horace home again, imagined that. she could hear yet in the dark myriad silence of the house Aunt Sally’s genteel and placid snores.

At times it would be so distinct that she would pause suddenly and speak Aunt Sally’s name into an empty room. And sometimes Aunt Sally replied, having availed herself again of her prerogative of coming in at any hour the notion took her, unannounced, to see how they were getting along and to complain querulously of her own household She was old, too old to react easily to change, and it was hard for her to readjust herself to her sisters’ ways again after her long sojourn in a household where everyone gave in to her regarding all domestic affairs. At home her older sister ran things in a capable shrewish fashion; she and the third aster persisted in treating Aunt Sally like the child she had been sixty-five years ago, whose diet and clothing and hours must be rigorously and pettishly supervised.

“I can’t even go to the bathroom in peace,” she complained querulously. “Pm a good mind to pack up and move back over here, and let ‘em get along the best way they can.” She rocked fretfully in the chair which by unspoken agreement was never disputed her, looking about the room with her bleared old eyes. “That nigger don’t half clean up since I left. That furniture, now...a damp cloth...”

“I wish you would take her back,” Miss Sophia, the elder aster, told Narcissa. “She’s got so crochety since she’s been with you that there’s no living with her. What’s this I hear Horace’s taken up? Making glassware?”

His proper crucibles and retorts had arrived intact. At first he had insisted on using the cellar, clearing out the lawn mower and the garden tools and all the accumulate impedimenta, and walling up the windows so as to make a dungeon of it. But Narcissa had finally persuaded him upon the upper floor of the garage and here he had set up his furnace and had had four mishaps and produced one almost perfect vase of clear amber, larger, more richly and chastely serene and which he kept always on his night table and called by his sister’s name in the intervals of apostrophizing both of them impartially in his moments of rhapsody over the realization of the meaning of peace and the unblemished attainment of it, as Thou still unravished bride of quietude.

At times he found himself suddenly quiet, a little humble in the presence of the happiness of his winged and solitary cage. For a cage it was, barring him from freedom with trivial compulsions; but he desired a cage. A topless cage, of course, that his spirit might wing on short excursions into the blue, but far afield his spirit did not desire to go: its direction was always upward plummeting, for a plummeting fall.

Still unchanging days. They were doomed days; he knew it, yet for the time being his devious and uncontrollable impulses had become one with the rhythm of things as a swimmer’s counter muscles become one with a current, and cage and all his life grew suave with motion, oblivious of destination. During this period not only did his immediate days become starkly inevitable, but the dead thwarted ones with all the spent and ludicrous disasters which his nature had incurred upon him, grew lustrous in retrospect and without regret, and those to come seemed as undeviating and logical as mathematical formulae beyond an incurious golden veil.

At Sewanee, where he had gone as his father before him, he had been an honor man in his class. As a Rhodes Scholar he had gone to Oxford, there to pursue the verities and humanities with that waiting law office in a Mississippi country town like a gate in the remote background through which he must someday pass, thinking of it not often and with no immediate perspective, accepting it with neither pleasure nor regret Here, amid the mellow benignance of these walls, was a perfect life, a life accomplishing itself placidly in a region remote from time and into which the world’s noises came only from afar and with only that glamorous remote significance of a parade passing along a street far away; with inferences of brass and tinsel fading beyond far walls, into the changeless sky. Here he developed a reasonably fine discrimination in alcohol and a brilliant tennis game, after his erratic electric fashion; but save for an occasional half sophomoric, half travelling-sales-manish sabbatical to the Continent in company with fellow-countrymen, his life was a golden and purposeless dream, without palpable intent or future with the exception of that law office to which he was reconciled by the sheer and youthful insuperability of distance and time.

There had come a day on which he stood in that mild pleasurable perplexity in which we regard our belongings and the seemingly inadequate volume of possible packing space, coatless among his chaotic possessions, slowly rubbing the fine unruly devastation of his head About the bedroom bags and boxes gaped, and on the bed, on chairs, on the floor, were spread his clothes—jackets and trousers of all kinds .and all individual as old friends. A servant moved about in the next room and he entered, but the man ignored him with silent and deft efficiency, and he went on to the window. The thin curtains starred to a faint troubling exhalation of late spring. He put their gentle billowing aside and lit a cigarette and idly watched the match fall, its initial outward impulse fading into a wavering reluctance, as though space itself were languid in violation. Someone crossing the quad called up to him indistinguishably. He waved his hand vaguely in reply and sat on the window sill.

Outward, above and beyond buildings peaceful and gray and old, within and beyond trees in an untarnished and gracious resurgence of green, afternoon was like a blonde woman going slowly in a windless garden; afternoon and June were like blonde sisters in a windless garden—close, approaching without regret the fall of day. Walking a little slower, perhaps; perhaps looking backward, but without sadness, untroubled as cows. Horace sat in the window while the servant methodically reduced the chaps of his possessions to the boxes and bags, gazing out across ancient gray roofs, and trees which he had seen in all their seasonal moods, in all moods matching his own. Had he been younger he would have said goodbye to them secretively or defiantly; older, he would have felt neither the desire to nor the impulse to suppress it. So he sat quietly in his window for the last time while the curtains stirred delicately against his hair, brooding upon their dreaming vistas where twilight was slowly finding it self and where, beyond dissolving spires, lingered grave evening shapes; and he knew a place where, had he felt like walking, he could hear a cuckoo, that symbol of sweet and timeless mischief, that augur of

the fever renewed again.

All he wanted anyway was quiet and dull peace arid a few women, preferably-young and good looking and fair tennis players, with whom to indulge in harmless and lazy intrigue. So his mind was made up, and on the homeward boat he framed the words with which he should tell his father that he was going to be an Episcopal minister. But when he reached New York the wire waited him saying that Will Benbow was ill, and all thoughts of his future fled his mind during the journey home and during the two subsequent days that his father lived. Then Will Benbow was buried beside his wife, and Aunt Sally Wyatt was sombrely ubiquitous about the house and talked with steady macabre complacence of Will at meals and snored placidly by night in the guest room. The next day but one Horace opened his father’s law office again.

His practice, what there was of it, consisted of polite interminable litigation that progressed decorously and pleasantly from conference to conference, the greater part of which were given to discussions of the world’s mutations as exemplified, by men or by printed words; conferences conducted as often as not across pleasant dinner tables or upon golf links or, if the conferee were active enough, upon tennis court—conferences which wended their endless courses without threat of consummation or of advantage or detriment to anyone involved.

There reposed also in a fire-proof cabinet in his office—the one concession Will Benbow had ever made to progress—number of wills which Horace had inherited and never read, the testators of which accomplished their lives in black silk and lace caps and an atmosphere of formal and timeless desuetude in stately, high-ceiled rooms screened from the ceaseless world by flowering shrubs and old creeping vines; existences circumscribed by church affairs and so-called literary clubs and a conscientious, slightly contemptuous preoccupation with the welfare of remote and obtusely ungrateful heathen peoples. They did not interest themselves in civic affairs. To interfere in the lives or conduct of people whom you saw daily or who served you in various ways or to whose families you occasionally sent food and cast-off clothing was not genteel Besides, the heathen was far enough removed from his willy-nilly elevation to annoy no one save his yet benighted brethren. Clients upon whom he called at rare intervals by formal and unnecessary request and who bade fair to outlive him as they had outlived his father and to be heired in turn by some yet uncorporeal successor to him. As if God, Circumstance, looking down upon the gracious if faintly niggard completeness of their lives, found not the heart to remove them from surroundings tempered so peacefully to their requirements, to any other of lesser decorum and charm.

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

3

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

Someone piped thinly to him from beyond the adjoining fence; it was Belle’s eight-year-old daughter, her dress of delicate yellow a single note in a chord of other small colored garments engaged in the intense and sober preoccupations of little girls. Horace waved his racket and went on and turned into Belle’s drive.

The gravel slipped with short sibilance beneath his rubber soles. He did not approach the house but followed instead along the drive toward the rear, where already against further sunshot green he saw a figure in white tautly antic with motion. They were playing already. Belle would be there, already ensconced in her usual chair: Ahenobarbus’ vestal, proprietorial and inattentive, preeningly dictatorial; removed from the dust and the heat and the blood; disdainful and the principal actor in the piece, O thou grave myrtle shapes amid which petulant Death…

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

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

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

But educate them she did. Certain young matrons took to the idea and emulated her, and even her husband himself had learned to take his cup.

Horace passed on around the house and there came into view the entire court with its two occupants in fluid violent action. Beneath an arcade of white pilasters and vine-hung beams Belle was ensconced like a colorful butterfly, surrounded by the fragile, harmonious impedimenta of the theatric moment Two sat with her; above the group a crepe-myrtle flowered already. The other woman (the third member of the group was a young girl in white and with a grave molasses bang and a tennis racket across her knees) spoke to him, and Belle greeted him with a sort of languid possessive desolation. Her hand was warm, prehensile, like mercury in his palm exploring softly with delicate bones and petulant scented flesh. Belle’s eyes were like hothouse grapes and her mouth was redly mobile, rich with discontent; but waked now from its rouged repose, this was temporarily lost. She had lost Meloney, she told him.

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

“She’s gone in business,” Belle answered fretfully. “A beauty shop. And why, I can’t for the life of me see. Those things never do last, here. Can you imagine Jefferson women supporting a beauty shop, with the exception of us three? Mrs. Marders and I might; I’m sure we need it, but what use has Frankie for one?”

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

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

“Now, Belle, we all know how kindhearted you are; don’t try to conceal it.”

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

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

“Don’t be silly,” Belle said.

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

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

heads all gummed up with pomade and things,” Belle added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t you like poets, Frankie?” Horace asked across Belle’s body.

“They can’t dance,” the girl answered, without turning her head. “I guess they are all right, though. They went to the war, the good ones did. There was one was a good tennis player, that got killed. I’ve seen his picture, but I don’t remember his name.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come on, Frankie,” he said. “Let’s you, and I take ‘em on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There’s Mr. Mitchell,” she-said. Harry Mitchell had come out, in tight flannels and a white silk shirt and new ornate sport shoes that cost twenty dollars per pair. With a new racket in a patent case and press, standing with his squat legs, and his bald bullet head and his undershot jaw of rotting teeth beside the studied picture of his wife. Presently, when he had been made to drink a cup of tea, he would gather up all the men present and lead them through the house to his bathroom and give them whisky, pouring out a glass and fetching it down to Rachel. He would give you the shirt off his back. He was a cotton speculator and a good one; he was ugly as sin and kindhearted and dogmatic and talkative, and he called Belle “little mother” until she broke him of it. Belle lay yet in her chair; she was watching them as they turned together from the court.

“What was it?” Horace persisted.

“Sir?”

“What you started to say just then.”

“Nothing,” she answered. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“Oh, that’s too feminine,” Horace said. “I didn’t expect that of you, after the way you play tennis.” They moved on under the veiled contemplation of Belle’s gaze.

“Feminine?” Then she added: “I hope I can get another set soon. I’m not a bit tired, are you?”

“Yes. Any woman might have said that. But maybe you’re not old enough to be a woman.”

“Horace,” Belle said.

I’m seventeen,” the girl answered. “Miss Belle likes you, don’t she?”

Belle spoke his name again, mellifluously, lazily peremptory. Airs Marders sat now with her slack chins in a raised teacup. The girl turned to him with polite finality. “Thanks for playing with me,” she said. “I’ll be better someday, I hope. We beat ‘em,” she said generally.

“You and the little lady gave ‘em the works, hey, big boy?” Harry Mitchell said, showing his discolored, teeth. His heavy prognathous jaw narrowed delicately down, then nipped abruptly off into pugnacious bewilderment.

“Mr. Benbow did,” the girl corrected in her clear voice, and she took the chair next Belle. “I kept on letting’em get my alley.”

“Horace,” Belle repeated, “your tea is getting cold.”

It had been fetched by the combination gardener-stableman-chauffeur, temporarily impressed and smelling of vulcanized rubber and ammonia. Mrs. Marders removed her chins from her cup. “Horace plays too well,” she said, “really too well. The other men can’t compete with him. You were lucky to have him for a partner, child,”

“Yessum,” the girl agreed. “I guess he won’t risk me again.”

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Marders rejoined, “Horace enjoyed playing with you. Didn’t you notice it, Belle?”

Belle made no reply. She poured Horace’s tea, and at this moment Belle’s daughter came across the lawn in her crocus-yellow dress. Her eyes were like stars, more soft and melting than any deer’s and she gave Horace a swift shining glance.

“Well, Titania?” he said.

Belle half turned her head, still with the teapot raised, and Harry set his cup on the table and went and knelt on one knee in her path, as if he were cajoling a puppy. The child came up, still watching Horace with her radiant arid melting diffidence, arid permitted her father to embrace her and fondle her with his short, heavy hands. “Daddy’s gal,” Harry said. She submitted to having her prim little dress mussed, pleasurably but a little restively; her eyes flew shining again.

“Don’t muss your dress, sister,” Belle said, and the child evaded her father’s hands with a prim movement “What is it now?” Belle asked. “Why aren’t you playing?”

“Nothing. I just came home.” She came arid stood diffidently beside her mother’s chair.

“Speak to the company,” Belle said. “Don’t you know better than to come where older people are, without speaking to them?” The little girl did so, shyly and faultlessly, greeting them in rotation, and her mother turned and pulled arid patted at her straight soft hair. “Now, do go arid play. Why do you always want to come where grown people are? You’re not interested in what we’re doing.”

“Ah, let her stay, mother,” Harry said. “She wants to watch her daddy and Horace play tennis.”

“Run along, now,” Belle added with a final pat, paying no attention to Harry. “And do keep your dress clean.”

“Yessum,” the child agreed, and she turned obediently, giving Horace another quick shining look. He watched her and saw Rachel stand presently in the kitchen door and speak to her, and she turned and mounted the steps and entered the door which Rachel held open.

“What a beautifully mannered child,” Mrs. Marders said. “How do you do it, Belle?”

“They’re so hard to do anything with,” Belle said. “She has some of her father’s traits. Drink your tea, Harry.”

Harry took his cup from the table and sucked its lukewarm contents into himself noisily and dutifully. “Well, big boy,” he said to Horace, “how about a set? These squirrels think they can beat us,”

“Frankie wants to play again,” Belle said. “Do let the child have the court for a little while.”

““What?” Harry was busy evolving his racket from its intricate and expensive casing. He paused and raised his savage undershot face and his dull kind eyes.

“No, no,” the girl protested quickly, “I’ve had enough. I’d rather look on a while.”

“Don’t be silly,” Belle said. “They can play any time.”

“Sure the little lady can play,” Harry said. “Here, you jelly-beans, how about fixing up a set with the little lady?” He restored his racket, with ostentatious care.

“Please, Mr. Mitchell,” the girl said.

“Don’t mind him,” Belle told her. “He and Horace can play some other time. You children go on and play. He’ll have to make the fourth, anyway.”

The ex-student spoke: “Sure, Mr. Harry, come on. Me and Frankie’ll play you and Joe.”

“You folks go ahead and play a set,” Harry repeated. “I’ve got a little business to talk over with Horace. You all go ahead.” He insisted, overrode their polite protests until they took the court. Then he jerked his head significantly at Horace.

“Go on with him,” Belle said. “The baby.” Without looking at him, without touching him, she enveloped him with rich and smoldering promise, Mrs. Marders sat across the table from them, curious and bright and cold with her teacup. “Unless you want to play with that silly child again.”

“Silly?” Horace repeated. “She’s too young to be unconsciously silly yet.”

“Run along,” Belle told him. “And hurry back. Mrs. Marders and I are tired of one another.”

Horace followed his host into the house, followed his short rolling gait and the bald indomitability of his head. From the kitchen, as they passed, little Belle’s voice came steadily, recounting some astonishment of the day, with an occasional mellow ejaculation from Rachel for antistrophe. In the bathroom Harry got a bottle from a cabinet, and preceded by labored heavy footsteps mounting, Rachel entered without knocking, bearing a pitcher of ice water. “Whyn’t y’all g’awn and play, ef you wants?” she demanded. “Whut you let that ‘oman treat you and that baby like she do, anyhow?” she demanded of Harry. “You ought to take and lay her out wid a stick of wood. Messin’ up my kitchen at fo’ o’clock in de evenin’. And you ain’t helpin’ none, neither,” she told Horace. “Gimme a dram, Mr. Harry, please, suh.”

She took her glass and waddled heavily out; they heard her descend the stairs slowly and heavily on her fallen arches. “Belle couldn’t get along without Rachel,” Harry said, rinsing two glasses. “She talks too much, like all niggers. To listen to her you’d think Belle was some kind of a wild animal, wouldn’t you? A damn tiger or something. But Belle and I understand each other. You’ve got to make allowances for women, anyway. Different from men. Born contrary; complain when you don’t please ‘em and complain when you do.” Then he said, with astonishing irrelevance: “I’d kill the man that tried to wreck my home like I would a damn snake. Well, let’s take one, big boy.”

Presently he sloshed ice water into his empty glass and gulped that, too, and he reverted to his former grievance.

“Can’t get to play on my own damn court,” he said. “Belle gets all these damn people here every day. What I want is a court where I can come home from work and get in a couple of fast sets every afternoon. Appetizer before supper. But every damn day I get home from work and find a lot of young girls and jelly-beans, using it like it was a public court.” Horace drank his more moderately, and Harry lit a cigarette and threw the match onto the floor and hung his leg across the lavatory. “I reckon I’ll have to build another court for my own use and put a hogwire fence around it with a Yale lock, so Belle can’t give picnics on it. There’s plenty of room down there by the lot fence. No trees, too. Put it out in the damn sun, and I reckon Belle’ll let me use it now and then. Well, suppose we get on back.”

He led the way through his bedroom and stopped to show Horace a new repeating rifle he had just bought, and to press upon him a package of cigarettes which he imported from South America, and they descended and emerged into afternoon become later. The sun was level now across the court where three players leaped and sped with soft quick slapping of rubber soles, following the fleeting impact of the ball. Mrs. Marders sat yet with her ceaseless chins, although she was speaking of departure as they came up. Belle turned her head against the chair-back, but Harry led Horace on.

“We’re going to look over a location for a tennis court. I think I’ll take up tennis myself,” he told Mrs. Marders with clumsy irony.

Horace halted in his loose, worn flannels, with his thin face brilliant and sick with nerves, smoking his host’s cigarettes and watching his hopeless indomitable head and his intent, faintly comical body as he paced off dimensions and talked steadily in his harsh voice; paced back and forth and planned and calculated with something of a boy’s fine ability for fabling, for shaping the incontrovertible present to a desire which he will presently lose in a recenter one and so forget.

Presently Harry was satisfied, and they returned. If was later still. Mrs. Marders was gone and Belle sat alone, immersed in a magazine. A youth in a battered Ford had called for Frankie, but another young man had dropped in, and when Horace and Harry came up the three youths clamored politely for Harry to join them.

“Take Horace here,” Harry said, obviously pleased. “He’ll give you a run for your money.” But Horace demurred and the three continued to importune Harry. “Lemme get my racket,” he said finally and Horace followed the heavy scuttling of his backside across the court Belle glanced up at them briefly.

“Did you find a place?” she asked.

“Yes,” Harry answered, uncasing his racket again ‘Where I can play by myself, sometimes. A place too far from the street for everybody that comes along to see it and stop.” But Belle was reading again Harry unscrewed his racket press and removed it.

“I’ll go in one set, then you and I can get in a fast one before dark,” he told Horace.

“Yes,” Horace agreed. He sat down and watched Harry stride heavily onto the court and take his position, watched the first serve. Then Belle’s magazine rustled and slapped onto the table.

“Come,” she said, rising. Horace rose too, and Belle preceded him and they crossed the lawn and entered the house. Rachel moved about in the kitchen, and they Went on through the house, where all noises Wore remote and the furniture gleamed peacefully indistinct in the dying evening light Belle slid her soft prehensile hand into his, clutching his hand against her softly clothed thigh, and led him into a room beyond folding doors. This room too was quiet and empty and here she stopped against him half turning, land they kissed. But she freed her mouth presently and led him on in the rising dusk and he drew the piano bench out and they sat on opposite sides of it and kissed again. “You haven’t told me you love me,” Belle said, touching his face with her fingertips, and the fine devastation of his hair. “Not in a long time.”

“Not since yesterday,” Horace agreed, but he told her, she leaning her breast against him and listening with a sort of rapt voluptuous inattention, like a great still cat; and when he had done and sat touching her face and her hair with his delicate wild hands, she removed her breast and opened the piano and touched the keys. Saccharine melodies she played, from memory and in the current mode, that you might hear on any vaudeville stage, and with shallow skill, a sense for their oversweet nuances. They sat thus for some time, Belle in another temporary vacuum of discontent, building with her hands and for herself an edifice, a world in which she moved romantically, finely and a little tragical; while Horace sat beside her and watched both Belle in her self-imposed and tragic role, and himself performing like the old actor whose hair is thin and whose profile is escaping him via his chin, but who can play to any cue at a moment’s notice while the younger men chew their bitter thumbs in the wings.

Presently the rapid heavy concussions of Harry’s feet thumped again on the stairs mounting, and the harsh wordless uproar of his voice as he led someone else in the back way and up to his bathroom. Belle ceased her hands and leaned her body against him and kissed him again, clinging. “This is intolerable,” she said, freeing her mouth with a movement of her head. For a moment she resisted against his arm, then her hands crashed discordantly upon the keys and slid through Horace’s hair and down his cheeks tightening. She freed her mouth again. “Now, sit over there,” she directed.

From his chair, she at the piano was half in shadow. Twilight was deeper yet; only the line of her bent head and her back, tragic and still, somehow young. We do turn corners upon ourselves, like suspicious old ladies spying on servants, Horace thought No, Eke boys trying to head off a parade. “There’s always divorce,” he said.

“To marry again?” Her hands trailed off into chords; they merged and faded again into a minor motif in one hand. Overhead Harry moved with his heavy staccato tread, shaking the house. “You’d make a rotten husband.”

“I won’t as long as I’m not married,” Horace answered.

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

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

“Come in, Titania,” Horace said.

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

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

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

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

“Go to the kitchen and talk to Rachel then,” Belle said. She struck the keys again, harshly. “You worry me to death, hanging around the house.” The little girl looked at them for a moment, then she turned obediently and went away. “Sit over there,” Belle repeated Horace resumed his chair and Belle sat in the twilight and played loudly and swiftly, with cold and hysterical skill. Overhead he heard Harry again, heard them descend the stairs. Harry was talking again; the voices passed on toward the rear, ceased. Belle continued to play. It was dance music in the new jazz tradition; still about him in the dark room that mindless protective antagonism like a muscular contraction that remains after the impulse of fright has faded Without ceasing she said:

“Are you going to stay for supper?”

He was not, he answered, waking suddenly. She did not rise with him, did not turn her head again, and he let himself out of the house and descended into the violet dusk of late spring, where was already a faint star above the windless trees. On the drive just without the garage Harry’s new car stood. At the moment he was doing something to the engine of it while the house-yard-stable boy held a patent trouble-lamp over the bald crag of his head and his daughter and Rachel peered across his bent back, leaning their intent and dissimilar faces into the soft bluish glare of the light. Horace went on homeward. and supperward. Before he reached the narrow street on which be lived the street lamps sputtered and failed, then glared beneath the dark boughs of trees, beneath delicate motionless veils of leaves.

4

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

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

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

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

Little Belle gave Horace her flying stars again. Harry squatted before her, “Did Horace bring daddy’s gal some flowers?” he brayed. “Just look at the flowers Horace brought her.” He put his hands on her again. Mrs. Marders said quickly:

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

“Daddy’s gal don’t care,” Harry answered. “Buy her a new dress tomorrow.” But little Belle freed herself, craning her soft brown head in alarm, trying to see the back of her frock, and then Belle entered in pink beneath a dark blue frothing of tulle, and the rich bloody auburn of her hair. Little Belle showed her Horace’s bouquet, and she knelt and fingered and patted little Belle’s hair, and smoothed her dress.

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

“Of course she did,” Horace interposed. “Just as you thank providence for breath every time you breathe.” Little Belle looked up at him with her grave ecstatic shining. “We think girls should always have flowers when they play music and dance,” he explained, gravely too. “Don’t we?”

“Yes,” little Belle agreed breathlessly.

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

“Yes, sir,” little Belle piped obediently.

Belle rose, swishing again. “Come on, sister. It’s time to begin. And don’t forget and start pulling at your clothes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think they both were,” he answered.

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

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

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

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

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

“I must take Narcissa home. She can’t go home by herself, you know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He turned away and found that his sister had descended the steps and was half way -down the dark walk to the street. “If you’re going my way, I’ll walk along with you,” he called to her. She made no reply, neither did she slacken her pace, nor did she increase it when he joined her.

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

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

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

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

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

“Is it true?” she asked after a time.

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

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

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

“Narcy—”

“Dont,” she said. “Don’t call me that” The next corner, beneath the next light, was theirs; they would torn there. Above the arching feathery canyon of the street the sinister gods stared down with their yellow, unwinking eyes. Horace thrust Ids hands into his jacket pockets, and for a space he was stilled again while his fingers learned the unfamiliar object they had found there. Thai he drew it forth: a sheet of heavy notepaper, folded twice and tinged with a fading heavy scent, a scent as of flowers that bloom richly at night A familiar scent, yet baffling , too for the moment, like a face watching him from an arras. He knew the face would emerge in a moment, but as he held the note in his fingers and sought the face through the corridors of his present distraction, his aster spoke suddenly and hard at his side.

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

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

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

This byway led her back to Miss Jenny. It was now well into June, and the scent of Miss Jenny’s transplanted jasmine drifted steadily into the house and surrounded it with constant cumulate Waves more grave and simple than a fading resonance of viols. The earlier flowers were gone, and the birds had ~ finished eating the strawberries and now sat about the fig bushes all day, waiting for them to ripen; zinnia and delphinium bloomed without any assistance from Isom who, since Caspey had more or less returned to normalcy (with the exception of Saturday nights) and laying-by time was yet a while away, now spent the lazy long days sleeping peacefully with a cane fishing pole on the creek bank Old Simon pottered querulously about the place. His linen duster and tophat gathered chaff on the nail in the harness room and the carriage horses waxed fat and insolent and lazy in the pasture. The duster and hat came down from their nail and the horses were harnessed to the carriage but once a week, now—on Sundays, to drive in to town to church. Miss Jenny said she was too far along to risk salvation by driving to church at fifty miles an hour; that she. had as many sins as her ordinary behavior could take care of, particularly as she had old Bayard’s soul to get into heaven somehow, also, what with him and young Bayard tearing around the country every afternoon at the imminent risk of their necks. About young Bayard’s soul Miss Jenny did not alarm herself at all: he had no soul

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

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

“I’ve got several more,” Narcissa answered lightly. “I’m saving them until I get enough for a book, then I’ll bring diem all out for you to read.” Miss Jenny sat opposite her, erect as a crack guardsman, with that cold briskness of hers that caused agents and strangers to stumble through their errands with premonitions of failure ere they began. But to Narcissa it was like emerging into the fresh air from a stale room. “I just came to see you,” she added, and for a moment her serene face held such grave and still despair that Miss Jenny sat more erect yet and stared at her guest with her piercing eyes.

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

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

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

There was dust on the piano; Narcissa opened it with a fine gesture, and brushed her fingertips on her skirt “If you’ll let me get a cloth—”

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

Without rising Miss Jenny leaned forward and touched Narcissa’s arm. “Now, you tell me what it is,” she commanded, And Narcissa told her, quietly in her grave contralto while her eyes still wept.

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

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

Miss Jenny dug into the pocket of her skirt and handed the other a man’s handkerchief.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “Don’t she wash often enough?”

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

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

The other wept more quietly now. She sat up and dried her eyes on Miss Jenny’s handkerchief. “It started before he went away. Don’t you remember?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

5

For a time the earth held him in a smoldering hiatus that might have been called contentment. He was up at sunrise, planting things in the ground and watching them grow and tending them; he cursed and harried niggers and males into motion and kept them there, and put the grist mill into raining shape and taught Caspey to drive the tractor, and came in at mealtimes and at night smelling of machine oil and of stables and of the earth and went to bed with grateful muscles and with the sober rhythms of the earth in his body, and so to sleep. But he still waked at times in the peaceful darkness of his familiar bed and without previous warning, tense and sweating with old terror; and always and constant beneath activity and bodily fatigue and sleep and all, that stubborn struggling of his heart which would not wear away.

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

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

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

He saw Narcissa about the house now and then, sometimes at the table, and he was aware of her shrinking and of her distaste. But not for long at a time and with no other emotion save a mild curiosity as to why she had not married. Miss Jenny told him that she was twenty-six, the same age as himself.

Then sowing time was over, and it was summer. Cotton and corn was out of the ground and laid-by; the grist mill was ready to run arid the gin had been overhauled, and one day he found himself with nothing to do. It was like coming dazed out of sleep, out of the warm, sunny valleys where people lived; and again the cold peak of his stubborn despair stood bleakly among black and savage stars and the valleys were obscured by shadow.

The road descended in a quiet red curve between pines through which the hot July winds swelled with a long sound like a faraway passing of trains, descended to a mass of lighter green of willows, where a creek ran beneath a stone bridge. At the top of the . grade the scrubby, rabbit-like mules stopped and the younger negro got down and lifted a gnawed white-oak sapling from the wagon and locked the off rear wheel by wedging the pole between the warped wire-bound spokes of it and across the axle tree. Then he climbed into the crazy wagon again, where the other negro sat motionless with the lifted rope-spliced reins in his hand and his head tilted creek* ward “Whut ‘uz dat?” he said.

“What ‘uz whut?” the other asked. But his father sat yet in his attitude of motionless grave attention, and the younger negro listened also. But there was no further sound save the long sough of the wind among the sober pines and the liquid whistling of a quail somewhere among diem. “Whut you hear, pappy?” he repeated.

“Somethin’ busted down dar. Tree fell, mebbe.” He jerked the reins. “Hwup, mules.” The mules flapped their jackrabbit ears and lurched the wagon into motion, and they descended among the cool dappled shadows, on the jarring scrape of the locked wheel that left behind it a glazed bluish ribbon in the soft red dust At the foot of the hill the road crossed the bridge and went on mounting again; beneath the bridge the creek rippled and flashed brownly among willows, and beside the bridge and bottom up in the creek, a motor car lay. Its front wheels were still spinning and the engine yet ran at idling speed, trailing a faint shimmer of exhaust The older negro drove onto the bridge and stopped, and the two of them sat and stared quietly down upon the car’s long belly. The younger negro spoke suddenly:

“Dar he is! He in de water under hit I kin see his foots stickin’ out.”

“He liable to drown, dar,” the other said, with static interest, and they descended from the wagon. The younger one slid down the creek bank; the other wrapped the reins about one of the stakes that held the bed on the wagon frame and thrust his peeled Hickory goad beneath the seat and circled the wagon without haste and dragged the white-oak pole free of the locked wheel and put it in the wagon. Then he also slid gingerly down the creek bank to where his son squatted, peering at young Bayard’s submerged legs.

“Don’t you git too clost to dat thing, boy” he commanded. “Hit mought blow up. Don’t you year hit still grindin’ in dar?”

“We got to git dat man out,” the younger one replied. “He gwine drown.”

“Don’t you tech ‘im. White folks’ll be sayin’ we done it. We gwine wait right heer ‘twell some white man comes erlong.”

“He’ll drown ‘fo’ dat,” the other said, “layin’ in dat water.” He was barefoot, and he stepped into the water and stood again with brown flashing wings of water stemming about his lean black calves.

“You, John Henry!” his father said. “You come ‘way f’um dat thing.”

“We got to git ‘im outen dar,” the boy repeated, and the one in the water and the other on the bank, they wrangled amicably while the water rippled about Bayard’s boot toes. Then the younger negro approached warily and caught Bayard’s leg and tugged at it. The body responded, shifted, stopped again, and grunting querulously the older one removed his shoes and stepped into the water also. “He hung again,” John Henry said, squatting in the water and searching beneath the car with his hand. “He hung under de guidin’ wheel. His haid ain’t quite under water, dough. Lemme git de pole.”

He mounted the bank and got the sapling from the wagon bed and returned and joined his father where the other stood in sober, curious disapproval above Bayard’s legs, and with the pole they lifted the car enough to drag Bayard free of it. They lifted him onto the shelving bank and he sprawled there in the sun, with his calm face and his matted hair, while water drained out of his boots, and they stood above him on alternate legs while they wrung out their overalls.

“Hist’s Cunnel Sartoris’s boy, ain’t it?” the elder said at last, and he lowered himself stiffly to the sand, groaning and grunting, and donned his shoes.

“Yessuh,” John Henry answered. “Is he daid, pappy?”;

“Co’se he is”, the other answered petulantly. “Atter that otto’bile jumped offen dat bridge wid ‘im? Whut you reckon he is, ef he ain’t daid? And whut you gwine say when de law axes how come you de onliest one dat found ‘im daid? Tell me dat.”

“Tell ‘urn you holp me.”

“Hit ain’t none of my business. I never run dat thing offen de bridge. Listen at it, dar, mumblin’ and grindin’ yit, You git on ‘fo’ hit blows up.”

‘We better git ‘im into town,” John Henry said. “Dey mought not be nobody else comin’ ‘long today.” He stooped and raised Bayard’s shoulders and tugged him to a sitting position. “He’p me git ‘im up de bank, pappy.” .

“Hit ain’t none of my business,” the other repeated, but he bent and picked up Bayard’s legs and they lifted him, and he groaned without waking.

“Dar, now,” John Henry exclaimed. “Hear dat? He ain’t daid.” But he might well have been, with his long inert body and his head wrung excruciatingly against John Henry’s shoulder. They shifted their grips and turned toward the road. “Hah,” said John Henry, “Le’s go!”

They struggled up the shaling treacherous bank with, him and onto the road, where the elder let his end of the burden slip to the ground. “Whuf,” he expelled his breath sharply. “He heavy ez a flou’ bar’l.”

“Come on, pappy,” John Henry said. “Le’s git ‘im in de waggin.” The other stooped again, with bared teeth, and they raised Bayard with dust caked redly on his wet thighs, and heaved him by panting stages into the wagon bed. “He looks lak a daid .man,” John Henry added, “and he sho’ do ack lak one. I’ll ride back here and keep his haid f’um bumpin’.”

“Git dat brakin’ pole you lef in de creek,” his father ordered, and John Henry descended and retrieved the sapling and got in the wagon again and lifted Bayard’s head onto his knees, and his father unwrapped the reins from the stanchion and mounted to the sagging seat and picked up his peeled hickory wand.

“I don’t lak dis kind o’ traffickin’,” he repeated. “Hwup, mules.” The mules lurched the wagon into motion once more, and they went on. Behind them the car lay on its back in the creek, its engine still muttered and rumbled at idling speed.

Its owner lay in the springless wagon, jolting lady and inert, oblivious of it and of John Henry’s dark compassionate face above him. Thus for some miles, while John Henry kept the sun: from Bayard’s face with the shadow of his hat, then their jolting progress penetrated into that region to which he had withdrawn arid he groaned again. “Drive slower, pappy,” John Henry said. “De joltin’ wakin’ ‘im up.”

“I caint he’p dat,” the elder replied, “I never run dat otto’bile offen dat bridge. I got to git on into town and git back home. Git on dar, mules.”

John Henry tried to ease him to the jolting, and Bayard groaned again and lifted his hand to his chest, and moved and opened his eyes. But he closed them immediately against the sun and he lay on John Henry’s knees, cursing. Then he moved again, trying to sit up. John Henry restrained htaj, firmly yet diffidently, and he opened his eyes again, struggling.

“Let go, goddam you!” he said. “I’m hurt.”

“Yessuh, captain; ef you’ll jes’ lay still—”

Bayard heaved himself violently, clutching his side; his teeth shone between his drawn, bloodless lips arid he gripped John Henry’s shoulder with a. clutch like steel hooks. “Stop,” he shouted. “Stop him; make him stop! He’s driving my damn ribs right through me!” He cursed again, trying to get onto his knees, gripping John Henry’s, shoulder, clutching his side with his other hand. The older negro turned and looked back at him. “Hit him with something,” Bayard shouted. “Make him stop. I’m hurt, goddamn it!”

The wagon stopped. Bayard was now on his hands and knees, bending lower and lower on all fours, like a wounded beast. The two negroes watched him quietly, and still clutching his side he moved and essayed to climb out of the wagon. John Henry jumped down and helped him, and he got slowly out and leaned against the wheel, with his sweating, bloodless. face and the dry grinning of his teeth.

“Git back in de waggin, captain, and le’s git to town to de doctor,” John Henry said.

Bayard stared at him, moistening his lips with his tongue. Then he moved again and crossed to the roadside and sat down, fumbling at the buttons of his shirt. The two negroes watched him. “Got a knife, son? “he asked presently.

“Yessuh.” John Henry produced his knife, and by Bayard’s direction he slit the other’s shirt off. Then the two of them bound it tightly about Bayard’s body, and he got to his feet

“Got a cigarette?” he asked,

John Henry had not. “Pappy got some chewin’ terbacker,” he suggested.

“Gimme a chew, then,” They gave him a chew and helped him back into the wagon and onto the seat, and drove on again. They jingled and rattled interminably onward in the red dust, through shadow and sunlight and uphill and down, while Bayard alternately chewed and swore. On and on, and at every jolt, with every breath he took, his broken ribs stabbed and probed into his flesh.

Then a final hill, and the road emerged from the trees and crossed the flat valley and joined the highway, and here they stopped while the sun blazed down on Bayard’s naked shoulders and bare head while he and the old negro wrangled as to whether they should drive him home or not, and Bayard swore and raged and suffered. At last he took the reins from the elder negro’s hands and swung the mules about himself . The negro continued to protest, querulously, until Bayard dug a banknote from his trousers and gave it to him and surrendered the lines, and they went on.

This last mile was the worst of all On all sides of them cultivated fields spread away to the shimmering hills: earth was saturated with heat and broken and turned and saturated again and drunken with it, exuding heat like an alcoholic’s breath. The trees along the road were sparse and but half grown, and the mules moved at a maddening walk in their own dust. His nerves had become inured to pain and had surrendered to it; he was conscious only of dreadful thirst and he knew that he was becoming light headed. The negroes too realized that he was going out of his head, and the younger one crawled precariously forward and offered him his frayed straw hat. Bayard accepted it and put it on.

The moles with their comical, overlarge ears assumed fantastic shapes, merged into other shapes without significance or meaning; shifted and changed again. At times it seemed to him that they were travelling backward, that they would crawl terrifically past the same tree or telephone post time after time; and it seemed to him that the three of them and the rattling wagon and the two beasts were caught in a ceaseless and senseless treadmill, a motion without progress, forever and to no escape.

But at last and without his being aware of it, the wagon turned in between the iron gates, and shadow fell gratefully upon his naked shoulders, and he opened his eyes and his home swam and floated in a pale mirage like a huge serene shape submerged in water. The jolting stopped and the two negroes helped him down. He mounted the steps and crossed the veranda; in the hallway, after the outer glare, he could see nothing at all for a moment and he stood, a little dizzy and nauseated, blinking. Then Simon’s eyeballs rolled out of the obscurity.

“Whut in de Lawd’s name,” said Simon, “is you been into now?”

“Simon?” he said. He swayed a little; to keep on his feet he strode on again and blundered into something. “Simon?”

Simon moved swiftly and touched him. “I kep’ tellin’ you dat car ‘uz gwine to kill you; I kep’ tellin’ you!” Simon slid his arm about Bayard and they went on. At the stairs he tried to turn Bayard, but Bayard wouldn’t be turned. He continued on down the hall and entered his grandfather’s study and stopped, leaning against a chair-back.

“Keys,” he said thickly. “Aunt Jenny. Got to have drink.”

“Miss Jenny done gone to town wid Miss Benbow,” Simon answered. “Dey ain’t nobody here, ain’t nobody here a-tall ‘cep’ de niggers. I kep’ a-tellin’ you!” he moaned again, pawing at Bayard. “Dey ain’t no blood, dough. Come to de sofa and lay down, Mist’ Bayard.”

Bayard moved again, and Simon supported him, and Bayard lurched around the chair and slumped into it, clutching his chest “Dey ain’t no blood,” Simon babbled.

“Keys,” Bayard said again. “Get the keys.”

“Yessuh, I’ll git ‘um.” Simon flapped his distracted hands about Bayard. Bayard swore at him, and still moaning Dey ain’t no blood, he turned and scuttled from the room. Bayard sat forward, clutching his chest, and heard Simon mount the stairs, heard him on the floor overhead. Then he was back, and Bayard watched him open the desk and extract the silver-stoppered decanter and scuttle out again and return with a glass, to find Bayard leaning against the desk, drinking from the decanter. Simon helped him back to the chair and poured him a drink into the glass. Then he fetched him a cigarette and hovered futilely and distractedly about him. “Lemme git de doctuh, Mist’ Bayard.”

“No. Gimme another drink.”

Simon obeyed. “That’s three, already. Lemme go git Miss Jenny en de doctuh, Mist’ Bayard, please, suh.”

“No. Leave me alone. Get out of here.”

He drank that one. The nausea, the mirage shapes, were gone, and he felt better. At every breath his side stabbed him with hot needles, so he was careful to breathe shallowly. If he could only remember that...Yes, he felt much better, so he rose carefully and went to the desk and had another drink. Yes, that was the stuff for a wound, like Suratt had said. Like that time last year when he got that tracer in his belly and nothing would stay on his stomach except gin-and-milk. And this, this wasn’t anything: just a few caved slats. Patch his fuselage with a little piano wire in ten minutes. Not like Johnny. They were all going right into his thighs. Damn butcher wouldn’t even raise his sights a little. He’d have to remember to breathe shallowly.

He crossed the room slowly but steadily enough. Simon flitted in the dim hall before him, and he mounted the stairs slowly, holding to the rail while Simon watched him with strained distraction. He entered his room, the room that had been his and John’s, and stood for a while until he could breathe shallowly again. Then he crossed to the closet and opened it, and kneeling carefully, with his hand to his side, he opened the chest which was there. There was not much in it: a garment; a small leather-bound book; a shotgun shell to which was attached by a piece of wire a withered bear’s paw. It was John’s first bear, and the shell with which he had killed it in the river bottom near MacCallum’s when he was twelve years old. The book was a New Testament; on the flyleaf in faded brown: To my son, John, on his seventh birthday, March 16, 1900, from his Mother.’ He had one exactly like it; that was the year grandfather had Arranged for the morning local freight to stop and pick them up and carry them to town to start to school The garment was a canvas hunting coat, stained and splotched with what had once been blood and scuffed and torn with briers and smelling yet faintly of saltpeter.

Still kneeling, he lifted the objects out one by one and laid them on the floor. He picked the coat up again, and its fading stale acridity drifted in his nostril? “Johnny,” he whispered, “Johnny.” Suddenly he raised the garment toward his face but halted it as sharply, and with the coat half raised he looked swiftly over his shoulder. But immediately he recovered himself and turned his head and lifted the garment and laid his face against it, defiantly and deliberately, and knelt so for a time.

Then he rose and gathered up the book and the trophy and the coat and crossed to his chest of drawers and took from the top of it a photograph. It was a picture of John’s Princeton eating club group, and he gathered this also tinder his arm and descended the stairs and passed put the back door. As be emerged Simon was just crossing the yard with the carriage, and as he passed the kitchen Elnora was crooning one of her mellow endless songs.

Behind the smoke-house squatted the black pot and the wooden tubs where Elnora did her washing in fair weather. She had been washing today; the clothes line swung with limp damp garments, and beneath the pot smoke yet curled from the soft wood ashes. He thrust the pot over with his foot and rolled it aside, and from the woodshed he fetched an armful of rich pine kindling and laid it on the ashes. Soon a blaze, pale in the sunny air; and when the wood was burning strongly he lid the coat and the Bible and the trophy and the photograph on the flames and prodded them and turned them until they were consumed. In the kitchen Elnora crooned mellowly as she labored; her voice came rich and plaintful and sad along the sunny reaches of the air. He must remember to breathe shallowly.

Simon drove rapidly on to town, but he had been forestalled. The two negroes had told a merchant about finding Bayard on the roadside and the news had reached Colonel Sartoris at the bank, who had sent for Dr. Peabody. But Dr. Peabody was gone fishing, so he took Dr. Alford instead, and the two of them in Dr. Alford’s car passed Simon just as he drove into town. He turned around and followed them, but by the time he arrived home they had young Bayard anaesthetized and temporarily incapable of further harm; and when Miss Jenny and Narcissa Benbow drove unsuspectingly up the drive an hour later, he was bandaged and conscious again. They had not heard of it, and Dr. Alford’s car was the first intimation. Although Miss Jenny did not recognize the car, she knew immediately what it meant. “That fool has killed himself at last,” she said, and got out and sailed into the house.