Flags in the Dust

9

Meanwhile she had received another letter from her anonymous correspondent. Horace when he came in one night, had brought it in to her as she lay in bed with a book; tapped at her door and opened it and stood for a moment diffidently, and for a while they looked at one another across the barrier of their estrangement and their stubborn pride.

“Excuse me for disturbing you,” he said stiffly. She lay beneath the shaded light, with the dark splash of her hair upon the pillow, and only her eyes moved as he crossed the room and stood above her where she lay with her lowered book, watching him with sober interrogation.

“What are you reading?” he asked. For reply she shut the book on her finger, with the jacket and its colored legend upward. But he did not look at it. IBs shirt was open beneath his silk dressing gown and jus thin hand moved among the objects on the table beside the bed; picked up another book. “1 never knew you to read so much.”

“It have more time for reading, now,” she answered.

“Yes.” His hand still moved about the table, touching things here and there. She lay waiting for him to speak. But he did not, and she said:

“What is it, Horry?”

Then he ceased, and he came and sat on the edge of the bed. But still her eyes were gravely interrogatory and the shadow of her mouth was stubbornly cold. “Narcy?” he said. She lowered her eyes to the book, and he added: “First, I want to apologize for leaving you alone so often at night.”

“Yes?”

He laid his hand on her knee. “Look at me.” She raised her face, and the antagonism of her eyes. “I want to apologize for leaving you alone at night,” he repeated.

“Does that mean you aren’t going to do it anymore, or that you’re not coming in at all?”

For a time he sat, brooding upon the wild repose of his hand upon her covered knee. Then he rose and stood beside the table again, touching the objects there, then he returned and sat on the bed. She was reading again, and he tried to take the book from her hand. She resisted.

“What do you want, Horace?” she asked impatiently.

He mused again while she watched him. Then he looked up. “Belle and I are going to be married,” he blurted.

“Why tell me? Harry is the one to tell. Unless you all are going to dispense with the formality of divorce.”

“Yes,” he said. “He knows it.” He laid his hand on her knee again, stroking it through the covers. “You aren’t even surprised, are you?”

“I’m surprised at you, but not at Belle. Belle has a backstairs nature.”

“Yes,” he agreed; then: “Who said that to you? You didn’t think of that.” She lay with her book half raised, watching him. He took her hand roughly; she tried to free it; but he held on. “Who was it?” he demanded.

“Nobody told me. Don’t Horace.”

He released her hand. “I know who it was. It was Mrs. Du Pre.”

“It wasn’t anybody,” she repeated. “Go away and leave me alone, Horace.” And behind the antagonism her eyes were hopeless and desperate. “Don’t you see that talking doesn’t help any?”

“Yes,” he said wearily, but he sat for a while yet, stroking her knee. Then he rose, but turning, he paused again. “Here’s a letter for you. I forgot it this afternoon. Sorry.”

But she was reading again. “Put it on the table,” she said, without raising her eyes. He laid it on the table and went out. At the door he looked back, but her head was bent over her book.

As he removed his clothes it did seem that that heavy fading odor of Belle’s body clung to them, and to his hands even after he was in bed; and clinging, shaped in the darkness beside him Belle’s rich voluption, until within that warm, not-yet-sleeping region where dwells the mother of dreams, Belle grew palpable in ratio as his own body slipped away from him. And Harry top, with his dogged inarticulateness and his hurt groping which was partly damaged vanity and shock, yet mostly a boy’s sincere bewilderment; that freed itself terrifically in the form of movie subtitles. Just before he slept his mind, with the mind’s uncanny attribute of irrelevant recapitulation, reproduced with the startling ghostliness of a Dictaphone, an incident which at the time he had considered trivial Belle had freed her mouth, and for a moment, with her body still against his, she held his face in her two hands and stared at him with intent questioning eyes. “Have you plenty of money, Horace?” And “Yes,” he had answered immediately. “Of course I have.” And then Belle again, enveloping him like a rich and fatal drug, like a motionless and cloying sea in which he watched himself drown.

The letter lay on the table that night, forgotten; it was not until the next morning that she discovered it and opened it.

“I am trying to forget you. I cannot forget you. Your big eyes, your black hair, how white your black hair will make you look. And how you walk I am watching you and a smell you give off like a flower. Your eyes shine with mystery and how you walk makes me sick like a fever all night thinking how you walk. I could touch you, you would not know it. Every day. But I can not I must pore out on paper must talk. You do not know who. Your lips like cupids bow when the day comes when I will press them to mine like I dreamed like a fever from heaven to hell. I know what you do I know more than you think I see men visiting you with bitter twangs. Be careful I am a desperate man. Nothing is any more to me now. If you unholy love a man I will kill him.

“You do not answer. I know you got it. I saw one in your hand. You better answer soon I am a desperate man eat up with fever. I can not sleep for. I will not hurt you but I am desperate. Do not forget I will not hurt you but I am a desperate man.”

Meanwhile the days accumulated. Not sad days nor lonely: they were too feverish to be sorrowful, what with the violated serenity of her nature torn in two directions, and the walls of her garden cast down, and she herself like a night animal or bird caught in a beam of light and trying vainly to escape. Horace had definitely gone his way; they could no longer hear one another’s feet on the dark road; and, like two strangers they followed the routine of their days, in an unbending estrangement of long affection and similar pride beneath a shallow veneer of polite trivialities. She sat with Bayard almost every day now, but at a discreet distance of two yards. At first he tried to override her with bluster, then with cajolery. But she was firm and at last he desisted and lay gazing quietly out the window or sleeping while she read. From time to time Miss Jenny would come to the door and look in at them and go away. Her shrinking, her sense of dread and unease while with him, was gone now, and at times instead of reading they talked, quietly and impersonally, with that ghost of that other afternoon between them, though neither referred to it. Miss Jenny had been a little curious about that day, but Narcissa was gravely and demurely noncommittal about it; nor had Bayard ever talked about it, and so there was another bond between them, but unirksome. Miss Jenny had heard gossip about Horace and Belle, but on this subject also Narcissa would not talk.

“Have it your own way,? Miss Jenny said tardy; “I can draw my own conclusions. I imagine Belle and Horace can produce quite a mess together. And I’m glad of it. That man is making an old maid out of you. It isn’t too late now, but if he’d waited five years later to play the fool, there wouldn’t be anything left for you except to give music lessons. But you can get married, now.”

“Would you advise me to marry?” Narcissa asked.

“I wouldn’t advise anybody to marry. You won’t be happy, but women haven’t got civilized enough yet to be happy unmarried, so you might as well try it. We can stand anything, anyway. And change is good for folks. They say it is, that is.”

But Narcissa didn’t believe that I shall never marry, she told herself. Men....that was where unhappiness lay. And if I couldn’t keep Horace, loving him as I did...Bayard slept. She picked up the book and read on to herself, about antic people in an antic world where things happened as they should. The shadows lengthened eastward. She read on, lost from mutable things.

After a while Bayard waked, and she fetched him a cigarette and a match. “You won’t have to do this anymore,” he said.; “I reckon you’re glad.”

His cast would come off tomorrow, he meant, and he lay smoking his cigarette and talking of what he would do when he was about again. He would see about getting his car repaired first thing; have to take it to Memphis, probably. And he planned a trip for the three of them—Narcissa, Miss Jenny and himself—while the car was in the shop. “It’ll take about a week,” he added. “She must be in pretty bad shape. Hope I haven’t hurt her guts any.”

“But you aren’t going to drive it fast anymore,” she reminded him. He lay still, his cigarette burning in his fingers. “You promised,” she insisted.

“When did I promise?”

“Don’t you remember? That...afternoon, when they were...”

“When I scared you?” She sat watching him with her grave troubled eyes. “Come here,” he said. She rose and went to the bed and he took her hand.

“You won’t drive it fast again?” she persisted.

“No,” he answered, “I promise.” And they were still so, her hand in his. The curtains stirred in the breeze, and the leaves on the branch beyond the window twinkled and turned and lisped against one another. Sunset was not far away; it would cease then. He moved.

“Narcissa,” he said, and she looked at him. “Lean your face down here.”

She looked away, and for a while there was no movement, no sound between them.

“I must go,” she said at last, quietly, and he released her hand .

His cast was gone, and he was up and about again, moving a little gingerly, it is true; but already Miss Jenny was beginning to contemplate him a little anxiously. “If we could just arrange to have one of his minor bones broken every month or so, just enough to keep him in the house...”she said.

“That won’t be necessary,” Narcissa told her. “He’s going to behave from now on.”

“How do you know?” Miss Jenny demanded. “What in the world makes you think that?”

“He promised he would.”

“He’ll promise anything when he’s flat on his back,” Miss Jenny retorted. “They all will; always have. But what makes you think he will?”

“He promised me he would,” Narcissa answered serenely.

His first act was to see about his car. It had been pulled into town and patched up after a fashion until it would run under its own power, but it would be necessary to take it to Memphis to have the frame straightened and the body repaired. Bayard was all for doing this himself, fresh-knit ribs and all, but Miss Jenny put her foot down and after a furious half hour, he was vanquished. And so the car was driven in to Memphis by a youth who hung around one of the garages in town. “Narcissa’ll take you driving in her car, if you must ride,” Miss Jenny told him.

“In that little peanut parcher?” Bayard said derisively. “It won’t do more than twenty-one miles an hour.”

“No, thank God,” Miss Jenny answered. “And I’ve written to Memphis and asked ‘em to fix yours so it’ll run just like that, too”

Bayard stared at her with slow and humorless bleakness. “Did you do any such damn thing as that?”

“Oh, take him away, Narcissa,” Miss Jenny exclaimed. “Get him out of my sight. I’m so tired of looking at you.”

But he wouldn’t ride in Narcissa’s car at first. He missed no opportunity to speak of it with heavy, facetious disparagement, but he wouldn’t ride in it Dr. Alford had evolved a tight rubber bandage for his chest so that he could ride a horse, but he had developed an astonishing propensity for lounging about the house when Narcissa was there. And Narcissa came quite often. Miss Jenny thought that it was on Bayard’s account and pinned the guest down in her forthright way; whereupon Narcissa told her about Horace and Belle while Miss Jenny sat indomitably erect on her straight chair beside the piano.

“Poor child,” she said, and “Lord, ain’t they fools?” and then: “Well, you’re right; I wouldn’t marry one of ‘em either.”

“I’m not,” Narcissa answered. “I wish there weren’t any of them in the world.”

Miss Jenny said, “Hmph.”

And then one afternoon they were in Narcissa’s car and Bayard was driving, over Narcissa’s protest at first. But he was behaving himself quite sensibly, and. at last she relaxed They drove down the valley road and turned off toward the hills, where the road mounted presently in long curves among dark pines in the slanting afternoon. The road wound on, with changing sunshot vistas of the valley and the opposite hills beyond at every turn, and always the sombre pines and their faint exhilarating odor. At last they topped a hill Below them the road sank, then flattened away toward a line of willows, crossed a stone bridge and rose again curving redly from sight among the pines.

“There’s the place,” he said.

“The place?” she repeated dreamily, rousing; then as the car rolled forward again, gaining speed, she understood. “You promised,” she cried, but he jerked the throttle all the way down its ratchet and she clutched him and tried to scream. But she could make no sound, nor could, she shut her eyes as the harrow bridge hurtled dancing toward them. And then her heart stopped and her breath as they flashed with a sharp reverberation like hail on a tin roof, between willows and a crashing glint of water and shot on up the next hill. The small car swayed on the curve, lost its footing and went into the ditch, bounded out and hurled across the road. Then Bayard straightened it out and with diminishing speed it rocked on up the hill, and at the top he stopped it. She sat beside him, with her bloodless mouth open, beseeching him with her wide hopeless eyes. Then she caught her breath, wailing.

“I didn’t mean—” he began awkwardly. “I just wanted to see if I could do it,” and he put his arms around her and she clung to him, moving her hands crazily about his shoulders. “I didn’t mean—” he essayed again, and then her crazed hands were on his face and she was sobbing wildly against his month.

10

Through the morning hours and following his sleepless night, he bent over his desk beneath the green-shaded fight; penning his neat; meticulous figures into the ledgers. The routine of the bank went on; old Bayard sat in his tilted chair in the fresh August morning while passers went to and fro, greeting him with florid cheerful gestures and receiving in return his half military salute—people cheerful and happy with their orderly affairs; the cashier served the morning line of depositors and swapped jovial anecdote with them. For this was the summer cool spell and there was a vividness in the air, a presage of the golden days of frost and yellowing persimmons in the worn-out fields, and of sweet small grapes in the. matted vines along the sandy branches, and the scent of cooking sorghum upon the smoky air. But the Snopes crouched over his desk after his sleepless night, with jealousy and thwarted desire and furious impotent rage in his vitals.

EGs head felt hot and dull, and heavy, and to the cashier’s surprise, he offered to buy the Coca-Colas, ordering two for himself, drank them one after the other and returned to his ledgers. So the morning wore away. His neat figures accumulated slowly in the ruled columns, steadily and, with a maddening aloofness from his own turmoil and without a mistake although his mind coiled and coiled upon itself, tormenting him with fleeing obscene images in which she moved with another. He had thought it dreadful when he was not certain that there was another; but now to know it, to find knowledge of it on every tongue...and young Sartoris, at that: a man whom he had hated instinctively with all his sense of inferiority and all the venom of his worm-like nature. Married, married. Adultery, concealed if suspected, he could have borne; but this, boldly, in the world’s face, flouring him with his own impotence...He dug a cheap, soiled handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped the saliva from his jaws;

By changing his position a little he could see old Bayard, could catch a glint of his white suit where he sat oblivious in the door. There was a sort of fascination in the old fellow now, serving as he did as an object upon which the Snopes could vent the secret, vicarious rage of his half-insane mind. And all during the morning he watched the other covertly; once old Bayard entered the cage and passed within arm’s length of him, and when he moved his hand to wipe his drooling mouth, he found that the page had adhered to his wrist, blotting the last entry he had made. With his knife blade he erased the smear and rewrote it,

So the morning wore away. He ordered more Coca-Colas and consumed his and returned to his desk Toward mid-morning the first fury that had raged in him had worn itself away, The images still postured in his mind, but they were now so familiar as to be without personal significance. Or rather, his dulled senses no longer responded so quickly; and one part of him labored steadily on with steady neat care while the other jaded part reviewed the coiling shapes with a sort of dull astonishment that they no longer filled his blood with fire-maenads. It was a sort of stupor, and he wrote on and on, and it was some time before his dulled nerves reacted to a fresh threat and caused him to raise his head Virgil Beard was just entering the door.

He slid hurriedly from his stool and slipped around a cabinet and darted through the door of old Bayard’s office. He crouched within the door, heard the boy ask politely for him, heard the cashier say that he was there a minute ago but that he reckoned he had stepped out; heard the boy say well, he reckoned he’d wait for him. And he crouched within the door, wiping his drooling mouth with his handkerchief.

After a while he opened the door cautiously and peered out The boy squatted patiently and blandly on his heels against the wall, and Snopes stood again with his clenched trembling hands. He did not curse: his desperate fury was beyond words; but his breath came and went with a fast ah-ah-ah sound in his throat and it seemed to him that his eyeballs were being drawn back and back into his skull, turning further and further until the cords that drew them reached the snapping. point. Then he opened the door and went out.

“Hi, Mr. Snopes,” the boy said genially, rising; but Snopes strode on and into the cage and approached the cashier.

“Res,” he said, in a voice scarcely articulate, “gimme five dollars.”

“What?” the cashier said.

“Gimme five dollars,” he repeated hoarsely. The cashier did so, scribbled a notation and speared it on the file at his elbow. The boy had come up to the second window, but Snopes passed on without looking at him, and he followed the man to the rear and into the office again, his bare feet hissing on the linoleum floor.

“I tried to find you last night,” he explained, “but you warn’t at home.” Then he looked up and saw Snopes’ face, and after a moment he screamed and broke his trance and turned to flee. But Snopes caught him, and he writhed and twisted, screaming steadily with utter terror as the man dragged him across the office and opened the door that gave onto the vacant lot. Snopes was trying to say something in his mad, shaking voice, but the boy screamed steadily. He had lost all control of his body and he hung limp in the man’s hand while Snopes thrust the bill into his pocket. Then he released the boy, who staggered away, found his legs, and fled.

“What were you whuppin’ that boy, for?” the cashier asked curiously, when he returned to the desk.

“For not mindin’ his own business,” Snopes snapped, opening his ledger again.

During the hour the cashier was out to lunch the Snopes was his outward usual self—uncommunicative but efficient, a little covertly sullen, with his mean, close-set eyes and his stubby features; patrons remarked nothing unusual in his bearing. Nor did the cashier when he returned, sucking a toothpick and belching at intervals. But instead of going home to dinner, Snopes repaired to a street occupied by negro stores and barber shops and inquired from door to door. After a half-hour search he found the negro he sought, held a few minutes’ conversation with him, then returned across town to his cousin’s restaurant and had a platter of hamburger steak and a cup of coffee. At two o’clock he was back at his desk.

The afternoon passed. Three o’clock came; he went around and touched old Bayard’s shoulder and he rose and dragged his chair inside and the Snopes closed the doors and drew the green shades upon the windows. Then he totaled his ledgers while the cashier, counted the cash. In the meantime Simon drove up to the door and presently old Bayard stalked forth and got in the carriage and was driven off. Snopes and the cashier compared notes and struck a balance, and while the other stacked the money away in receptacles he carried his ledgers one by one into the vault. The cashier followed with the cash and put it away and they emerged and the cashier was about to close the vault, when Snopes stopped him. “Forgot the cash-book,” he explained. The cashier returned to his window and Snopes carried the book into the vault and put it away and emerged and clashed the door to, and hiding the dial with his body, he rattled the knob briskly. The cashier had his back turned, rolling a cigarette.

“See it’s throwed good,” he said. Snopes rattled the knob again, then shook the door.

“That’s got it.” They took their hats and emerged from the cage and locked it behind them, and passed through the front door, which the cashier closed and shook also. He struck a match to his cigarette.

“See you tomorrow,” he said.

“All right,” Snopes agreed, and he stood looking after the other’s shapeless back in its shabby alpaca coat. He produced his soiled handkerchief and wiped his mouth again.

That evening about eight o’clock he was back down town. He stood for a time with the group that sat nightly in front of the drug store on the corner; stood quietly among them, listening but saying nothing, as was his way. Then he moved on, without being missed, and walked slowly up the street and stopped at the bank door. One or two passers spoke to him while he was finding his key and opening the door; he responded in his flat country idiom and entered and dosed the door behind him. A angle bulb burned above the vault He raised the shade on the window beside it and entered the grilled cage and turned on the light above his desk. Here passers could see him, could have watched him for several minutes as he bent over his desk, writing slowly. It was his final letter, in which he poured out his lust and his hatred and his jealousy, and the language was the obscenity which his jealousy and desire had hoarded away in his temporarily half-crazed mind and which the past night and day had liberated. When it was finished he blotted it carefully and folded it and put it in his pocket, and snapped his light off. He entered the directors’ room and in the darkness he unlocked the door which gave onto the vacant lot, closed it and left it unlocked.

He returned to the front and drew the shade on the window, and drew the other shades to their full extent, until no crack of light showed at their edges, emerged and locked the door behind him. On the street he looked casually back at the windows. The shades were close; the interior of the bank was invisible from the street.

The group still talked in front of the drug store and he stopped again on the outskirts of it. People passed back and forth along the street and in or. out of the drug store; one or two of the group drifted away, and newcomers took their places. An automobile drew up to the curb, was served by a negro lad; drove away. The clock on the courthouse struck nine measured strokes.

Soon, with a noise of starting engines, motor cars began to stream out of a side street and onto the square, and presently a flux of pedestrians appeared. It was the exodus from the picture show, and cars one after another drew up to the curb with young men and girls in them, and other youths and girls in pairs turned into the drug store with talk and shrill laughter and cries one to another, with slender bodies in delicate colored dresses, shrill as apes and awkward, divinely young. Then the more sedate groups—a man with a child or so gazing longingly into the scented and gleaming interior of the store, followed by three or; four women—his wife and a neighbor or so—talking sedately among themselves; more children—little girls in prim and sibilant clots, and boys scuffling and darting with changing adolescent shouts. A few of the sitters rose and joined passing groups.

More belated couples came up the street and entered the drug store, and other cars; other couples emerged and strolled on. The night watchman came along presently, with his star on his open vest and a pistol and a flashlight in his hip pockets; he. too stopped and joined in the slow, unhurried talk. The last couple emerged from the drug store, and the last car drove away. And presently the lights behind them flashed off and the proprietor jingled his keys in the door and rattled it, and stood for a moment among them, then went on. Ten o’clock. The Snopes rose to his feet.

“Well, I reckon I’ll turn in,” he said generally.

“Time we all did,” another said, and they rose also. “Goodnight, Buck.”

“Goodnight, gentlemen,” the night watchman replied.

The Snopes turned into the first street. He went steadily on beneath the spaced arc lights and turned into a narrower street and followed it. From this street he turned into a lane between massed honeysuckle higher than his head and sweet upon the night air. The lane was dark, and he increased his pace. On either hand the upper stories of houses rose above the honeysuckle, with now and then a lighted window among the dark trees. He kept close to the wall arid went swiftly on. He went now between back premises; lots and gardens, but before him another house loomed, and a serried row of cedars on the lighter sky; and he stole beside a stone wall and so came opposite the garage. He stopped here and sought in the lush grass beneath the wall and stooped and raised a pole, which he leaned against the wall. With the help of the pole he mounted to the top of the wall and so onto the garage roof.

But the house was dark, and presently he slid to the ground and with the desperate courage of his despair he stole across the lawn and stopped beneath a window. There was a light somewhere toward the front of the house, but no sound, no movement, and he stood for a time listening, darting his eyes this way and that, covert and ceaseless as a cornered animal.

The screen responded easily to his knife blade and he raised it and listened again. Then with a single scrambling motion he was in the room, crouching, with his thudding heart. Still no sound, and the whole house gave off that unmistakable emanation of temporary desertion. He drew out his handkerchief and wiped his mouth.

The light was in the next room, and he went on. The stairs rose from the end of this room and he scuttled silently across it and mounted swiftly into darkness again and groped through the darkness until he touched a wall, then a door. The knob turned under his fingers.

It was the right room; he knew that at once: her presence was all about him, and for a time his heart thudded and thudded in his throat and fury and lust and despair shook him like a rag. But he pulled himself together; he must get out quickly, and he groped his way across to the bed and lay face down upon it, his head buried in the pillows, writhing and making smothered, animal-like moanings. But he must get out, and he rose and groped across the room again. What little light there was was behind him now, and instead of finding the door he blundered into a chest of drawers, and stood there a moment. Then with sudden decision he opened a drawer and fumbled in it. It was filled with a faintly scented fragility of garments, but he could not distinguish one from another.

He found a match in his pocket and struck it beneath the shelter of his palm, and by its light he chose one of the soft garments, discovering as the match died a packet of letters in one corner of the drawer. He recognized them at once and he threw the dead match to the floor and removed the letter he had just written from his pocket and put it in the drawer and put the other letters in his pocket, and he stood for a time with the garment crushed against his face; remained so for some time, until a sound caused him to jerk his head up. A car was coming up the drive, and as he turned and sprang to the window, its lights swept beneath him and fell full upon the open garage, and he crouched at the window in utter panic. Then he turned and sped to the door and stopped again crouching, panting and snarling in indecision.

He turned and ran back to the window. The garage was dark, and two dark figures were coming toward the house and he crouched within the window .until they had passed from sight. Then, still clutching the garment, he climbed out the window and swung from the sill for a moment, closed his eyes and dropped

There was a crash of glass and he sprawled in a dusty litter, with other lesser crashes. He had fallen into a shallow, glassed flower pit and he scrambled out someway and tried to get to his feet and fell again, while nausea swirled in him. It was his knee, and he lay sick and with snarling teeth while his trouser leg sopped slowly and damply, clutching the garment he had stolen and scaring at the dark sky with wide, mad eyes. He heard voices in lite house, and a light came on in the window above him and he dragged himself erect again, restraining his vomit, and at a scrambling hobble he crossed the lawn and plunged into the shadow of the cedars beside the garage, where he lay staring at the house where a man leaned in a window, peering out and moaning a little while his blood ran between his clasped fingers. He drove himself onward again and dragged his bleeding leg over the wall and dropped into the lane and cast the pole down. A hundred yards further he stopped and drew his torn trousers aside and tried to bandage the long gash in his leg. But the handkerchief stained over almost at once, and still his blood ran and ran down his leg and into his shoe.

Once in the back room of the bank, he rolled his trouser leg up and removed the handkerchief and bathed the gash with cold water. It still bled, though not so much, and he removed his shirt and bound it as tightly as he could He still felt an inclination toward nausea, and he drank long of the tepid water from the lavatory tap. Immediately it warmed salinely inside him and he dung to the lavatory, sweating, trying not to vomit, until the spell passed. His leg felt numb and dead.

He entered the grilled cage. His left heel showed yet a bloody print on the floor, but no blood ran from beneath the bandage, The vault door opened soundlessly; without striking a match he found the key to the cash box and opened it He took only banknotes, which he stowed away in his inner coat pocket drat he took all he could find. Then he closed the vault and locked it returned to the lavatory and wetted a towel and removed his heel prints from the linoleum floor. He passed out the rear door, threw the latch so it would lock behind him. The dock on the courthouse rang midnight

In an alley between two negro stores he found the negro whom he had met at noon, with a battered Ford car. He gave the negro a bill and the negro cranked the car and came and stared curiously at his torn trousers and the glint of white cloth beneath. “Whut happened, boss? Y’aint hurt, is you?”

“Run into some wire,” he answered shortly, and drove on. As he crossed the square he saw the night watchman, Buck, standing beneath the light before the post office, and cursed him with silent and bitter derision. He drove on and passed from view, and presently the sound of his going had died away.

He drove through Frenchman’s Bend at two o’clock, without stopping. The village was dark; Varner’s store, the blacksmith shop (now a garage too, with a gasoline pump), Mrs. Littlejohn’s huge, unpainted boarding house—all the remembered scenes of his boyhood—were without life; he went on. He drove now along a rutted wagon road, between swampy jungle, at a snail’s pace. After a half hour the road mounted a small knoll wooded with scrub oak and indiscriminate saplings, and faded into a barren, sun-baked surface in the middle of which squatted a low, broken-backed log house. His lights swept across its gaping front, and a huge gaunt hound descended from the porch and bellowed at him. He stopped and switched the lights off.

His leg was stiff and dead, and when he descended he was forced to cling to the car for a time, moving it back and forth until it would bear his weight. The hound stood ten feet away and thundered at him in a sober conscientious fury until he spoke to it, whereupon it ceased its clamor but stood yet in an attitude of watchful belligerence. He limped toward it, and it recognized him and together they crossed the barren plot in the soundless dust and mounted the veranda. “Turpin,” he called in a guarded voice.

The dog had followed him onto the porch, and it flopped noisily and scratched itself . The house consisted of two wings joined by an open hall; through the hall he could see sky, and another warped roof tree on the slope behind the house. His leg tingled and throbbed as with pins of fire. I got that ‘ere bandage too tight, he thought. “Turpin.”

A movement from the wing at his left, and into the lesser obscurity of the hall a shape emerged and stood in vague relief against the sky, in a knee-length night-shirt and a shotgun. “Who’s thar?” the shape demanded

“Byron Snopes.”

The man leaned the gun against the wall and came onto the porch, and they shook hands limply. “What you doin’ this time of night? Thought you was in town.”

“On a trip for the bank,” Snopes explained. “Just drove in, and I got to git right on. Might be gone some time, and I wanted to see Minnie Sue.”

The other tabbed the wild shock of his head, then he scratched his leg. “She’s a-sleepin’. Caint you wait till daylight?”

“I got to git on,” he repeated. “Got to be pretty nigh Alabama by daybreak.”

The man brooded heavily, rubbing his flank, “Well,” he said finally, “ef you caint wait till

mawnin’.” He padded back into the house and vanished. The hound flopped again at Snopes’ feet and sniffed noisily. From the river bottom a mile away an owl hooted with its mournful rising inflection. Snopes thrust his hand into his coat and touched the wadded delicate garment. In his breast pocket the money bulked against his arm.

Another figure stepped soundlessly into .the hall, against the lighter sky; a smaller figure and even more shapeless, that stood for a moment, then came out to him. He put his arms around her, feeling her free body beneath the rough garment she had hastily donned. “Byron?” she said, “What is it, Byron?” He was trying to kiss her, and she suffered him readily, but withdrew her face immediately, peering at him. He drew her away from the door.

“Come on,” he whispered. His voice was shaking and hoarse, and his body was trembling also. He led her to the steps and tried to draw her on, but she held back a little, peering at him.

“Let’s set on the steps,” she said. “What’s the matter, Byron? You got a chill?”

“I’m all right. Let’s get away where we can talk.”

She let him draw her forward and down the steps, but as they moved further and further away from the house she began to resist, with curiosity and growing alarm. “Byron,” she said again and stopped. His hands were trembling upon her, moving about her body, and his voice was shaking so that she could not understand him.

“You ain’t got on nothing under here but your nightgown, have you?” he whispered.

“What?” He drew her a little further, but she stopped firmly and he could not move her; she was as strong as he. “You tell me what it is, now,” she commanded. “You ain’t ready fer our marryin’ yet, are you?”

But he made no answer. He was trembling more than ever, pawing at her. They struggled, and at last he succeeded in dragging her to the ground and he sprawled beside her, pawing at her clothing; whereupon she struggled in earnest, and soon she held him helpless while he sprawled with his face against her throat, babbling a name not hers. When he was still she turned and thrust him away, and rose to her feet

“You come back tomorrer, when you git over this,” she said, and she ran silently toward the house, and was gone.

He sat where she had left him for a long time, with his half-insane face between his knees and madness and helpless rage and thwarted desire coiling within him. The owl hooted again from the black river bottom; its cry faded mournfully across the land, beneath the chill stars, and the hound came silently through the dust and sniffed at him, and went away. After a time he rose and limped to the car and started the engine.

FOUR

1

It was a sunny Sunday afternoon in October, Narcissa and Bayard had driven off soon after dinner, and Miss Jenny and did Bayard were sitting on the sunny end of the veranda when, preceded by Simon, the deputation came solemnly around the corner of the House from the rear. It consisted of six negroes in a catholic variety of Sunday raiment and it was headed by a huge, neckless negro in a Prince Albert coat and a hind-part-before collar, with an orotund air and a wild, compelling eye.

“Yere dey is, Cunnel,” Simon said, and without pausing he mounted the steps and faced the deputation, leaving no doubt in the beholder’s eye as to which side he was aligned with. The deputation halted and milled a little, solemnly decorous.

“What’s this?” Miss Jenny demanded. “That you, Uncle Bird?”

“Yessum, Miss Jenny.” One of the deputation uncovered his grizzled wool and bowed. “How you gittin’ on?” The others shuffled their feet, and one by one they removed their hats. The leader clasped his across his chest like a congressional candidate being photographed.

“Here, Simon,” old Bayard said. “What’s this? What did you bring these niggers around here for?”

“Dey come fer dey money,” Simon explained.

“What?”

“Money?” Miss Jenny repeated with interest “What money, Simon?”

“Dey come fer de money you promised ‘um,” Simon shouted.

“I told you I wasn’t going to pay that money,” old Bayard said. “Did Simon tell you I was going to pay it?” he demanded of the committee.

“What money?” Miss Jenny repeated. “What are you talking about, Simon?” The leader of the deputation was shaping his mouth to words, but Simon forestalled him.

“Why, Cunnel, you tole me yo’self to tell dem niggers you wuz gwine pay’um.”

“I didn’t do any such thing,” old Bayard answered violently. “I told you that if they wanted to put you in jail, to go ahead and do it. That’s what I told you.”

“Why, Cunnel, you said it jes’ ez plain. I kin prove it by Miss Jenny you tole me—”

“Not by me,” Miss Jenny denied. “This is the first I heard about it. Whose money is it, Simon?”

Simon gave her a pained, reproachful look. “He tole me to tell ‘um he wuz gwine pay it.”

“I’m damned if I did,” old Bayard stormed. “I told you I wouldn’t pay a damn cent of it. And I told you that if you let ‘em worry me about it, I’d skin you alive, sir.”

“I ain’t gwine let ‘um worry you,” Simon answered soothingly. “You jes’ give ‘um dey money, en me en you kin fix it up later.”

“I’ll be eternally damned if I will; if I let a lazy nigger that ain’t worth his keep—”

“But somebody got to pay ‘um,” Simon pointed out patiently. “Ain’t dat right, Miss Jenny?”

“That’s right,” Miss Jenny agreed. “But it’s not me.”

“Yessuh, dey ain’t no argument dat somebody got to pay ‘um. Ef somebody don’t pay ‘em dey’ll put me in jail And den whut’ll y’all do, widout nobody to keep dem hosses fed en clean, and to clean de house en wait on de table? Co’se I don’t mine gwine to jail, even ef dem stone flo’s ain’t gwine do my mis’ry no good.” And he drew a long and affecting picture, of high and grail-like principles, and patient abnegation. Old Bayard slammed his feet to the floor.

“How much is it?”

The leader swelled impressively in his Prince Albert. “Brudder Mo’,” he said, “will you read out de total emoluments owed to de pupposed Secon’ Baptis’ church by de late Deacon Strother in his capacity ez treasurer of de church boa’d?”

Brother Moore in the rear of the group genuflected himself, Thai ready hands pushed him into the foreground—a small ebon negro in sombre, over-large black—where the parson majestically made room for him. He laid his hat on the earth at his feet and from the right-hand pocket of his coat he produced in the following order, a red bandana handkerchief; a shoe horn; a plug of chewing tobacco, and holding these in his hand he delved yet further, with an expression of mildly conscientious alarm. Then he replaced the objects, and from his left-hand pocket he produced a pocket knife; a stick on which was wound a length of dingy string; a short piece of leather strap attached to a rusty buckle, and lastly a greasy, dog-eared notebook. He crammed the other things back into the pocket, dropping the leather strap, which he stooped and recovered, then he and the parson held a brief whispered conversation. He opened the notebook and fumbled the pages over, fumbled at them until the parson leaned over his shoulder and found the proper page and laid his finger upon it.

“How much is it, reverend?” old Bayard asked.

“Brudder Mo’ will now read out de amount,” the parson said. Brother Moore stared at the page and mumbled something in a weak, indistinguishable voice.

“What?” old Bayard demanded.

“Make ‘im talk up,” Simon said. “Can’t nobody tell whut he sayin’.”

“Louder,” the parson rumbled, with just a trace of impatience.

“Sixty-sevum dollars en fawty cents,” Brother Moore articulated at last. Old Bayard sat and swore for a time, then rose and tramped into the house, still swearing. Simon sighed and relaxed. The deputation milled again, politely, and Brother Moore faded briskly into the rear rank of it The parson, however, still retained his former attitude of fateful and solemn profundity.

“What became of that money, Simon?” Miss Jenny asked curiously. “You had it, didn’t you?”

“Dat’s whut dey claims,” Simon answered.

“What did you do with it?”

“Hit’s all right,” Simon assured her. “I jes’ put it out, sort of.”

“I bet you did,” she agreed drily. “I bet it never even got cool while you had it. Who did you put it out to?”

“Oh, me and Cunnel done fix dat up” he said, “long time ago.” Old Bayard tramped in the hall again, and emerged flapping a check in his hand.

“Here,” he commanded, and the parson approached the railing and took it and folded it away in his coat pocket. Old Bayard glared at Simon. “And the next time you steal money and come to me to pay it back, I’m going to have you arrested and prosecute you myself, you hear? Get those niggers out of here.”

The deputation stirred again, with a concerted movement, but the parson halted than with a commanding hand. He turned and faced Simon. “Deacon Strother,” he said, “ez awdained minister of de late Fust Baptis’ church, en recalled minister of the pupposed Secon’ Baptis’ church, en chairman of dis committee, I hereby reinfests you wid yo. fawmer capacity of deacon in de said pupposed Secon’ Baptis’ church. Amen. Cunnel Sartoris en ma’am, good day.” Then he turned and herded his committee from sight.

“Thank de Lawd, we got rid of dat,” Simon said, and he came and lowered himself to the top step, groaning pleasurably.

“And you remember what I said,” old Bayard warned him. “One more time, now—”

But Simon was peering in the direction the church committee had taken. “Dar now,” he said. “Whut you reckon dey wants now?” For the deputation had returned and it now peered diffidently around the corner.

“Well,” old Bayard said violently “What is it now?”

They were trying to thrust Brother Moore forward again, but he would not be thrust. At last the parson spoke.

“You fergot de fawty cents, whitefolks.”

“What?”

“He says you lef out de extry fawty cents “Simon shouted. Old Bayard exploded; Miss Jenny chapped her hands over her ears and the committee rolled its eyes in fearsome admiration while he soared to magnificent heights, alighting finally upon Simon.

“You give him that forty cents, and get’em out of here,” old Bayard finished. “And if you ever bring ‘em back here again, I’ll take a horsewhip to the whole lot of you.”

“Lawd, Cunnel, I ain’t got fawty cents, en you knows it. Can’t dey do widout dat, after gittin’ de rest of it?”

“Yes you have, Simon,” Miss Jenny said, “Yon had a half a dollar left after I ordered those shoes for you last night.” Again Simon looked at her with pained astonishment.

“Give it to ‘em,” old Bayard commanded. Slowly Simon reached into his trousers and produced a half dollar and turned it slowly in his palm.

“I mought need dis money, Cunnel,” he protested. “Seems like dey mought leave me dis.”

“Give ‘em that money!” old Bayard thundered. “I reckon you can pay forty cents of it, at least.” Simon rose reluctantly, and the minister approached to meet him.

“Whar’s my dime change?” he demanded, nor would he surrender the coin until the two nickels were in his hand. Then the committee departed.

“Now,” old Bayard said, “I want to know; what you did with that money.”

“Well, suh,” Simon began, “it wuz like dis. I put dat money out” Miss Jenny rose.

“My Lord,” she said, “are you all going over that again?” And she left them. In her room, where she sat in a sunny window, she could still hear them—old Bayard’s stormy rage, and Simon’s bland and ready evasion rising and falling on the drowsy Sabbath air.

There was a rose, a single remaining rose. Through the sad, dead days of late summer it had continued to bloom, and now though persimmons had long swung their miniature suns among the caterpillar-festooned branches, and gum and maple and hickory had flaunted four gold-and-scarlet weeks, and the grass, where grandfathers of grasshoppers squatted sluggishly like sullen octogenarians, had been pencilled twice delicately with frost, and the sunny noons were scented with sassafras, it still bloomed Overripe now, and a little gallantly blowsy, like a fading burlesque star. Miss Jenny worked in a sweater, nowadays, and her trowel glinted brightly in her earthy glove.

“It’s like some women I’ve known,” she said. “It just don’t know how to give up gracefully and be a grandmamma.”

“Let it have the summer out,” Narcissa, in her dark woolen dress, protested. She had a trowel too, and she pottered serenely after Miss Jenny’s scolding brisk impatience, accomplishing nothing. Worse than Isom, because she demoralized Isom, who had immediately given his unspoken alliance to the Left, or passive, Wing. “It’s entitled to its summer.”

“Some folks don’t know when summer’s over,” Miss Jenny rejoined. “Indian summer’s no excuse for senile adolescence.”

“It isn’t senility, either.”

“All right. You’ll see, someday.”

“Oh, someday. I’m not quite prepared to be a grandmother, yet.”

“You’re doing pretty well.” Miss Jenny trowelled a tulip bulb carefully and expertly up and removed the clotted earth from its roots. “We seem to have pretty well worn out Bayard, for the time being,” she continued. “I reckon we’d better name him John.”

“Yes?”

“Yes,” Miss Jenny repeated. “We’ll name him John. You, Isom!”

The gin had been running steadily for a month, now, what with the Sartoris cotton and that of other planters further up the valley, and of smaller croppers with their tilted fields among the hills. The Sartoris place was farmed on shares. Most of the tenants had picked their cotton, and gathered the late corn; and of late afternoons, with Indian summer upon the land and an ancient sadness sharp as woodsmoke on the still air, Bayard and Narcissa would drive out to where, beside a dilapidated cotton house on the edge of a wooden ravine above a spring, the tenants brought their cane and made their winter supply of sorghum molasses. One of the negroes, a sort of patriarch among them, owned the mill and the mule that furnished the motive power. He did the community grinding and superintended the cooking of the juice for a tithe, and when Bayard and Narcissa arrived the mule would be plodding in a monotonous circle, its feet rustling in the dried cane-pith, drawing the long wooden beam which turned the mill into which one of the patriarch’s grandsons fed the cane.

Round and round the mule went, setting its narrow, deerlike feet delicately down in the hissing cane-pith, its neck bobbing limber as a section of rubber hose in the collar, with its trace-galled flanks and flopping, lifeless ears, and its half-closed eyes drowsing venomously behind pale lids, apparently asleep with the monotony of its own motion. Some Cincinnatus of the cotton fields should contemplate the lowly destiny, some Homer should sing the saga, of the mule and of his place in the South. He it was, more than any one creature or thing, who, steadfast to the land when all else faltered before the hopeless juggernaut of circumstance, impervious to conditions that broke men’s hearts because of his venomous and patient preoccupation with the immediate present, won the prone South from beneath the iron heel of Reconstruction and taught it pride again through humility and courage through adversity overcome; who accomplished the well-nigh impossible despite hopeless odds, by sheer and vindictive patience. Father and mother he does not resemble, sons and daughters he will -never have; vindictive and patient (it is a known fact that he will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once); solitary but without pride, self-sufficient but without vanity; his voice is his own derision. Outcast and pariah, he has neither friend, wife, mistress nor sweetheart; celibate, he is unscarred, possesses neither pillar nor desert cave, he is not assaulted by temptations nor flagellated by dreams nor assuaged by visions; faith, hope and charity are not his. Misanthropic, he labors six days without reward for one creature whom he hates, bound with chains to another whom he despises, and spends the seventh day kicking or being kicked by his fellows. Misunderstood even by that creature (the nigger who.drives him) whose impulses and mental processes most closely resemble his, he performs alien actions among alien surroundings; he finds bread not only for a race, but for an entire form of behavior; meek, his inheritance is cooked away from him along with his soul in a glue factory. Ugly, untiring and perverse, he can be moved neither by reason, flattery, nor promise of reward; he performs his humble monotonous duties without complaint, and his meed is blows. Alive, he is haled through the world, an object of general execration; unwept, unhonored and unsung, he bleaches his awkward, accusing bones among rusting cans and broken crockery and worn-out automobile tires on lonely hillsides, while his flesh soars unawares against the blue in the craws of buzzards.

As they approached, the groaning; and creaking of the mill would be the first intimation^ unless the wind happened to blow toward them. Then it would be the sharp, subtly exciting odor of fermentation and of cooking molasses to greet them. Bayard liked the smell of it, and they would drive up and sit for a time while the boy rolled his eyes covertly at them as he fed the mill, watching the patient unceasing mule and the old man stooped above the simmering pot. Sometimes Bayard got out and went over and talked to him, leaving Narcissa alone in the car, lapped in the ripe odors of the failing year and all its vague, rich sadness, her gaze brooding quietly upon Bayard and the old negro—the one lean and tall and fatally young and the other stooped with time, while her spirit went out in serene and steady waves, surrounding him unawares.

Then he would return and get in beside her, and she would touch his rough clothing but so lightly that he was not conscious of it, and they would drive back along the faint road, beside the flaunting woods, and soon, above turning oaks and locusts, the white house simple and huge and steadfast, and the orange disc of the harvest moon beyond the trees, halved like a cheese by the ultimate hills.

Sometimes they went back after dark. The mill was still then, its long motionless arm like a gesture across the firelit scene. The mule was munching somewhere in stable, or stamping and nuzzling its empty manger, or asleep standing, boding not of tomorrow; and against the .firelight many forms moved. The negroes had gathered now: old men and women sitting on crackling cushions of cane about the blaze which one of their number fed with pressed stalks until its incense-laden fury swirled licking at the boughs overhead, making more golden still the twinkling golden leaves; and young men and girls, and children squatting and still as animals, staring into the fire. Sometimes they sang—quavering, wordless chords in which sad monotonous minors blent with mellow bass in passionless suspense and faded along the quivering golden air, to be renewed. But when the white folks arrived the singing ceased, and they sat or lay about the crackling scented blaze on which the blackened pot simmered, talking in broken phrases murmurous with overtones ready with sorrowful mirth, while in shadowy beds among the dry whispering canestalks youths and girls murmured and giggled.

Always one of them, and sometimes both, stopped in the “office” where old Bayard and Miss Jenny sat. There was a fire of logs on the hearth now, and they would sit in the glow of it—Miss Jenny beneath the light with her lurid daily paper; old Bayard with his slippered feet propped against the fireplace, his head wreathed in smoke and the old setter dreaming fitfully beside his chair, reliving proud and ancient stands perhaps, or further back still, the lean, gawky days of his young doghood, when the world was full . of scents that maddened the blood in him and pride had not yet taught him self-restraint; Narcissa and Bayard between them—Narcissa dreaming too in the firelight, grave and still and serene, and young Bayard smoking his cigarettes in his leashed and moody repose.

At last old Bayard would throw his cigar into the fire and drop his feet to the floor, and the dog would raise its head and blink and yawn with such gaping deliberation that Narcissa, watching him, invariably yawned also. “Well, Jenny?”

Then Miss Jenny would lather paper aside and rise. “Let me,” Narcissa would say. “Let me go.” But Miss Jenny never would, and presently she would return with a tray and three glasses, and old Bayard would unlock his desk and fetch the silver-stoppered decanter and compound three toddies with ritualistic care.

Once Bayard persuaded Narcissa into khaki and boots and carried her ‘possum hunting. Caspey with a streaked and blackened lantern and a cow’s horn slung over his shoulder, and Isom with a gunny sack and an axe, and four shadowy, restless hounds waited for them at the lot gate and they set off among ghostly shocks of corn, where every day almost Bayard kicked up a covey of quail, toward the woods.

“Where we going to start tonight, Caspey?” Bayard asked.

“Back of Unc’ Henry’s. Day’s one in dat grape vine behind de cotton house. Blue treed ‘im down dar las’ night.”

“How do you know he’s there tonight, Caspey?” Narcissa asked.

“He be back,” Caspey answered confidently. “He right dar now, watchin’ dis lantern wid his eyes scrooched up, listenin’ to hear ef de dawgs wid us.”

They climbed through a fence and Caspey stooped and set the lantern on the ground. The dogs moiled and tugged about his legs with sniffings and throaty growls at one another as he unleashed them. “You, Ruby! Stan’ still, dar. Hole up here, you potlickin’ fool.” They whimpered and surged, their eyes melting in fluid brief gleams, then they faded soundlessly and swiftly into the darkness. “Give ‘um a little time,” Caspey said. “Let ‘um see ef he dar yit.” From the darkness ahead a dog yapped three times on a high note. “Dat’s dat young dawg,” Caspey explained. “Jes’ showin’ off. He ain’t smelt nothin’.” Overhead the stars swam vaguely in the hazy sky; the air was not yet chill, and the earth was warm yet. They stood in a steady oasis of lantern light in a world with but one dimension, a vague cistern of darkness filled with meagre light and topped with an edgeless canopy of ragged stars. It was smoking and emanating a faint odor of heat. Caspey lifted it and turned the wick down and set it at his feet again. Then from tie darkness there came a single note, resonant and low and grave.

“Dar he,” Isom said.

“Hit’s Ruby,” Caspey agreed, picking up the lantern. “She got ‘im.” The young dog yapped again, with fierce hysteria, then the single low cry chimed once more. Narcissa slid her arm through Bayard’s and they hurried on. “ ‘Taint no rush,” Caspey told her. “Dey ain’t treed yit. Whooy. H’mon, dawg.” The young dog had ceased its yapping, but still at intervals the other one bayed her single timbrous note,” and they followed it. “H’mon, dawg.”

They stumbled a little over fading plow-scars, after Casper’s bobbing lantern, and the darkness ahead was suddenly crescendic with short steady cries in four keys. “Dey got ‘im,” Isom said.

“Dat’s right,” Caspey replied. “Le’s go. Hold ‘im, dawg!” They trotted now, Narcissa clinging to Bayard’s arm, and plunged through rank grass and over another fence and so among trees. Eyes gleamed fleetingly from the darkness ahead, and another gust of barking interspersed with tense and eager whimperings, and among stumbling half-lit shadows dogs surged about them. “He up dar,” Caspey said. “Ole Blue sees ‘im.” He raised the lantern and set it upon his head, peering up into the vine-matted sapling, and Bayard drew a flashlight from his jacket and turned its beam into the tree. The three older hounds sat in a tense circle about the tree, whimpering or barking in short spaced gusts, but the young one yapped steadily in mad, hysterical rushes. “Kick dat’ puppy still,” Caspey commanded.

“You, Ginger, hush yo’ mouf,” Isom shouted; he laid his axe and sack down and caught the puppy and held it between his knees. Caspey and Bayard moved slowly around the tree, among the tease dogs; Narcissa followed them. “Dem vines is so thick...” Caspey said.

“Here he is,” Bayard said suddenly “I’ve got ‘im.” He steadied his light and Caspey moved behind him and stared over his shoulder.

“Where?” Narcissa asked.

“Dat’s right,” Caspey agreed. “Dar he is. Ruby don’t lie. When she say he dar, he dar.”

‘Where is he, Bayard?” Narcissa repeated. He drew her before him and trained the light over her head, into the tree, and presently from the massed vines two reddish joints of fire not a match-breadth apart; gleamed at her, winked out, then shone again. “He moving” Caspey said. He young ‘possum. Git up dar and shake ‘im out, Isom.” Bayard held his light on the creature’s eyes and Caspey set his lantern down and herded the dogs together at his knees, Isom scrambled up into the tree and vanished in the vine, but they could follow his progress by the shaking branches and his panting as he threatened the animal with a mixture of cajolery and adjuration,

“Hah,” he panted. “Ain’t gwine hurt you. Ain’t gwine do nothin’ ter you but th’ow you in de cook-pot. Look out, mister; I’se coming up dar.” He stopped; they could hear him moving the branches cautiously. “Here he,” he called suddenly. “Hole dem dawgs, now.”

“Little ‘un, ain’t he?” Caspey asked.

“Can’t tell. Can’t see nothin’ but his face. Watch dem dawgs.” The upper part of the tree burst into violent and sustained commotion; Isom’s voice whooped louder and louder as he shook the branches. “Here he comes,” he shouted, and something dropped sluggishly and reluctantly from branch to branch, stopped, and the dogs set up a straining clamor, then fell again, and Bayard’s light followed a lumpy object that dropped with a resounding thud to the earth and vanished immediately beneath a swirl of hounds. Caspey and Bayard leaped among them, and at last Narcissa saw the creature in the pool of the flashlight, lying on its side in a grinning curve, its eyes closed and its pink, baby-like hands doubled against its breast. She watched the motionless thing with a little loathing—such a contradiction, its vulpine, skull-like grin and those tiny, human-looking hands, and the long, rat-like tail of it. Isom dropped from the tree, and Caspey turned the two straining clamorous dogs he held over to him and picked up the axe, and while Narcissa watched in shrinking curiosity, he laid the axe across the thing’s neck and put his foot on either end of the axe, and grasped the animal’s tail...She turned and fled, her hand to her mouth.

But the wall of darkness stopped her and she stood trembling and a little sick, watching them as they moved about the lantern. Then Caspey drove the dogs away and Isom picked up the lumpy sack and swung it to his shoulder, and Bayard turned and looked for her. “Narcissa?”

“Here,” she answered. He came to her.

“That’s one. We ought to get a dozen, tonight.”

“No,” she said, shuddering. “No;” He peered at her in the darkness.

“Not tired already, are you?”

“No,” she answered, “I just....Come on; they’re going.”

Caspey led than on through the woods, now. They walked in a dry sibilance of leaves and crackling undergrowth. Trees loomed out of the darkness; above them, among the thinning branches, stars swam in the hushed, vague sky. The dogs were on ahead, and they went on over the uneven ground, sliding down into washes and ditches where sand gleamed in the pale glow of the lantern and the scissoring shadow of Caspey’s legs was enormous, struggled up the other side.

“We better head away fum de creek bottom,” Caspey suggested. “Dey mought strike a ‘coon, and den dey won’t git home ‘fo’ day.” He bore away toward the fields again.“H’mon, dawg.” They went on. Narcissa was beginning to tire, but Bayard strode on with a fine obliviousness of that possibility, and she followed without complaint. At last, from far away, came that single ringing cry. Caspey stopped. “Le’s see which way he gwine.” They stood in the darkness, in the sad, faintly chill decline of the year, among the dying trees. “Whooy,” Caspey shouted mellowly. “Go git ‘im.”

The dog replied, and they moved again, slowly, pausing at intervals to listen. The hound bayed again; there were two voices now, and they seemed to be moving in a circle across their path. “Whooy,” Caspey called, his voice ebbing in falling echoes among the motionless trees. They went on. Again the dogs gave tongue, this time from a direction opposite that where the first one had bayed. “He ca’yin’ ‘um right back whar he come fum,” Caspey said. ‘We better wait ‘twell dey gits ‘im straightened out.” He set the lantern down and squatted beside it, and Isom sloughed his burden and squatted also, and Bayard sat against a tree trunk and drew Narcissa down beside him. The dogs bayed again, nearer. Caspey turned his head and stared off into the darkness toward the sound.

“He headin’ fer dat holler tree, ain’t he?” Isom asked.

“Soun’ like it.” They listened, motionless. “We have a job, den. Whooy.” There was a faint chill in the air now, as the day’s sunlight cooled from the ground, and Narcissa moved closer to Bayard. He took a packet of cigarettes from his jacket and gave Caspey one and lit his own. Isom squatted on his heels, his eyes rolling whitely in the lantern light.

“Gimme one, please, suh,” he said.

“You ain’t got no business smoking, boy,” Caspey told him. But Bayard gave him one, and he squatted leanly on his heels, holding the white cylinder in his black diffident hand. The dogs bayed again, mellow and chiming and timbrous in the darkness. “Yes, suh,” Caspey repeated, “he headin’ fer dat down tree.”

“You know this country like you do the back yard, don’t you, Caspey?” Narcissa said.

“Yessum, I ought to. I been over it a hund’ed times since I wuz bawn. Mist’ Bayard do too. He been huntin’ it long ez I is. Him and Mist’ Johnny bofe. Miss Jenny send me wid ‘um when de had dey fust gun; me and dat ‘ere single bar’l gun I used to have to tie together wid a string. You member dat ole single bar’l, Mist’ Bayard? But hit ‘ud shoot. Many’s de fox squir’l we shot in dese woods. Rabbits, too.” Bayard was leaning against the tree. He was gazing off into the treetops and the soft sky beyond, his cigarette burning slowly in his hand. She looked at his bleak profile against the lantern glow, then she moved closer against him. But he did not respond, and she slid her hand into his. But it too was unresponsive, and again he had left her for the bleak and lonely heights of his frozen despair. Caspey was speaking again, in his slow, consonantless voice with its overtones of mellow sadness. “Mist’ Johnny, now, he sho’ could shoot. You ‘member dat time me and you and him wuz—”

Bayard rose. He dropped his cigarette and crushed it carefully with his heel. “Let’s move on,” he said. “They ain’t going to tree.” He drew Narcissa to her feet and turned and went on ahead of them. Caspey got up and unslung his horn and put it to his lips. The sound swelled about them, grave arid clear and prolonged, then it died into echoes and so into silence again, leaving no ripple.

It was near midnight when they left Caspey and Isom at their cabin and followed the lane toward the house. After a while the barn loomed before them, and the house among its thinning trees, against the hazy sky. He opened the gate and she passed through and he followed and closed it, and turning he found her beside him, arid stopped. “Bayard?” she whispered, leaning against him, and he put his arms around her and stood so, staring above her head into the sky. She took his face between her hands and drew it down, but his lips were cold and upon them she tasted fatality and doom, and she clung to him for a time, her head bowed against his chest.

After that she would not go with him again. So he went alone, returning anywhere between midnight and dawn, ripping his clothing off quietly in the darkness and sliding cautiously into bed. But when he was still, she would touch him and speak his name in the darkness beside him, and turn to him warm and soft with deep. And they would lie so, holding each other in the darkness and the temporary abeyance of his despair and the isolation of that doom he could not escape.

2

“Well,” Miss Jenny said briskly, above the soup, “your girl’s gone and left you, and now you can find time to come out and see your kinfolks, can’t you?”

Horace grinned a little. “To tell the truth, I came out to get something to eat. I don’t think that one woman in ten has any aptitude for keeping house, but my place is certainly not in the home.”

“You mean,” Miss Jenny corrected, “that not one man in ten has sense enough to marry a decent cook.”

“Maybe they have more sense and consideration for others than to spoil decent cooks,” he suggested.

“Yes,” young Bayard said, “even a cook’ll quit work when she gets married.”.

“Dat’s de troof,” Simon, propped in a slightly florid attitude against the sideboard, in a collarless boiled shirt and his Sunday pants (it is Thanksgiving day) and reeking a little of whisky in addition to his normal odors, agreed. “I had to find Euphrony fo’ new cookin’ places de fust two mont’ we wuz ma’ied.”

Dr. Peabody said: “Simon must have married somebody else’s cook.”

“I’d rather marry somebody else’s cook than somebody else’s wife,” Miss Jenny snapped.

“Miss Jenny!” Narcissa reproved. “You hush.”

“I’m sorry,” Miss Jenny said immediately. “I wasn’t saying that to you, Horace: it just popped into my mind. I was talking to you, Loosh Peabody. You think just because you’ve been eating off of us Thanksgiving and Christmas for sixty years, that you can come into, my own house and laugh at me, don’t you?”

“Hush, Miss Jenny!” Narcissa repeated.

“What’s dat?” Old Bayard, his napkin tucked into his waistcoat, lowered his spoon ,and cupped his hand to his ear.

“Nothing” young Bayard told him, “Aunt Jenny and Doc fighting again. Come alive, Simon,” Simon stirred and removed the soup plates, but laggardly, still giving his interested attention to the altercation.

“Yes,” Miss Jenny finished on, “just because that old fool of a Will Falls put axle grease on a little bump on his face without killing him dead, you have to go around swelled up like a poisoned dog; What did you have to do with it? You certainly didn’t take it off. Maybe you conjured it on his face to begin with?”

“Haven’t you got a piece of bread or something Miss Jenny can put in her mouth, Simon?” Dr. Peabody added mildly. Miss Jenny glared at him a moment, then flopped back in her chair.

“You, Simon! Are you dead?” Simon removed the plates and bore them out, and the guests sat avoiding one another’s eyes a little, while Miss Jenny behind her barricade of cups and jugs and urns and things, continued to breathe fire and brimstone.

“Will Falls,” old Bayard repeated. “Jenny, tell Simon, when he fixes that basket, to come to my office.: I’ve got something to go in it.” This something was the pint flask of whisky which he included in old man Falls’ Thanksgiving and Christmas basket and which the old man divided out in spoonsful as far as it would go among his ancient and homeless cronies on those days; and invariably old Bayard reminded her to remind Isom of what neither of them ever forgot or overlooked.

“All right,” she answered. Simon reappeared, with a huge silver coffee urn, set it at Miss Jenny’s hand and retreated kitchenward.

“How many of you want coffee now?” she asked generally. “Bayard will no more sit down to a meal without his coffee than he’d fly. Will you, Horace?” He declined, and without looking at Dr. Peabody she said: “I reckon you’ll have to have some, won’t you?”

“If it’s no trouble,” he answered mildly. He winked at Narcissa, then he assumed an expression of lugubrious diffidence. Miss Jenny drew two cups, and Simon appeared with a huge platter borne gallantly and precariously aloft and set it before old Bayard with a magnificent flourish.

“My God, Simon,” young Bayard said, “where did you get a whale this time of year?”

“Dat’s a fish in dis worl’, mon,” Simon agreed. And it was a fish. It was three feet long and broad as a saddle blanket; it was a-jolly red color and it lay gaping on the platter with an air of dashing and rollicking joviality.

“Dammit, Jenny,” old Bayard said pettishly, “what did you want to have this thing, for? Who wants to clutter his stomach up with fish, in November, with a kitchen full of ‘possum and turkey and squirrel?”

“There are other people to eat here beside you,” she retorted. “If you don’t want any, don’t eat it. We always had a fish course at home,” she added. “But you can’t wean these Mississippi country folks away from bread and meat to save your life. Here, Simon.” Simon set a stack of plates before old Bayard and he now came with his tray and Miss Jenny set two coffee cups on it, and he served them to old Bayard and Dr. Peabody. Miss Jenny drew a cup for herself, and Simon passed sugar and cream. Old Bayard carved the fish, still rumbling heavily.

“I ain’t ever found anything wrong with fish at any time of year,” Dr. Peabody said.

“You wouldn’t,” Miss Jenny snapped. Again he winked heavily at Narcissa.

“Only,” he continued, “I like to catch my own, out of my own pond. Mine have mo’ food value.”

“Still got your pond, Doc?” young Bayard asked.

“Yes. But the fishin’ ain’t been so good, this year. Abe had the flu last winter, and ever since he’s been goin’ to sleep on me, and I have to sit there and wait until he wakes up and takes the fish off and baits my hook again. But finally I thought about tyin’ one end of a cord to his leg and the other end to the bench, and now when I get a bite, I just give the string a yank and wake ‘im up. You’ll have to bring yo’ wife out someday, Bayard. She ain’t never seen my pond.”

“You haven’t?” Bayard asked Narcissa. She had not. “He’s got a row of benches around it, with foot-rests, and a railing just high enough to prop your pole on, and a nigger to every fisherman to bait his hook and take the fish off. I don’t see why you feed all those niggers, Doc.”

“Well, I’ve had them around so long I don’t know how to get rid of ‘em, ‘less I drown ‘em. Feedin’ ‘em is the main trouble, though. Takes everything I can make. If it wasn’t for them, I’d a quit practicin’ long ago. That’s the reason I dine out whenever I can: every time I get a free meal, it’s the same as a half holiday.”

“How many have you got?” Narcissa asked.

“I don’t rightly know,” he answered. “I got six or seven registered ones, but I don’t know how many scrubs I have. I see a new yearlin’ every day or so.” Simon was watching him with rapt interest.

“You ain’t got no extra room out dar, is you, Doctor?” he asked. “Here I slaves all day long, keepin’ ‘um in vittles en sech.”

“Can you eat cold fish and greens every day?” Dr. Peabody asked him solemnly.

“Well, suh,” Simon answered doubtfully, “I ain’t right sho’ erbout dat. I burnt out on de fish once, when I wuz a young man, en I ain’t had no right stomach fer it since.”

“Well, that’s about all we eat, out home.”

“All right, Simon,” Miss Jenny said. Simon was propped statically against the sideboard, watching Dr. Peabody with musing astonishment.

“En you keeps yo’ size on cole fish en greens? Gentlemun, I’d be a bone-rack on dem kine o’ vittles in two weeks, I sho’ly would.”

“Simon!” Miss Jenny raised her voice sharply. “Why won’t you let him alone, Loosh, so he can ‘tend to his business?” Simon came abruptly untranced and removed the fish.

“Lay off of Doc, Aunt Jenny,” young Bayard said. He touched his grandfather’s arm. “Can’t you make her let Doc alone?”

“What’s he doing, Jenny?” old Bayard asked. “Won’t he eat his dinner?”

“None of us’ll get to eat anything, if he sits there and talks to Simon about cold fish and greens,” Miss Jenny replied.

“I think you’re mean, to treat him like you do, Miss Jenny,” Narcissa said. She sat beside Horace; beneath the cloth her hand was in his.

“Well, it gives me something to be thankful for,” Dr. Peabody answered. “That I’m a widower. I want some mo’coffee, Jenny.”

“Who wouldn’t be, the size of a hogshead, and living on cold fish and turnip greens?” Miss Jenny snapped. He passed his cup and she refilled it.

“Oh, shut up, Aunt Jenny,” young Bayard commanded. Simon appeared again, with Isom in procession now, and for the next few minutes they moved steadily between kitchen and dining room with a roast turkey and a cured ham and a dish of quail and another of squirrel, and a baked ‘possum in a bed of sweet potatoes; and Irish potatoes and sweet potatoes, and squash and pickled beets, and rice and hominy, and hot biscuit and beaten biscuit and long thin sticks of combread, and strawberry and pear preserves, and quince and apple jelly, and blackberry jam and stewed cranberries.

Then they ceased talking for a while and really ate, glancing now and then across the table at one another in a rosy glow of amicability and steamy odors. From time to time Isom entered with hot bread, while Simon stood overlooking the field somewhat as Caesar must have stood looking down into Gaul, once he had it well in hand, or the Lord God Himself when he looked down upon His latest chemical experiment and said It is well.

“After this, Simon,” Dr. Peabody said, and he sighed a little, “I reckon I can take you on and find you a little side meat now and then.”

“I ‘speck you kin,” Simon agreed, watching them like an eagle-eyed general who rushes reserves to the threatened points, pressing more food upon them as they faltered But even Dr. Peabody allowed himself vanquished after a time, and then Simon brought in pies of three kinds, and a small, deadly plum pudding, and cake baked cunningly with whisky and nuts and fruit and treacherous and fatal as sin; and at last, with an air sibylline and gravely profound, a bottle of port. The sun lay hazily in the glowing west, failing levelly through the windows and upon the silver arrayed upon the sideboard, dreaming in hushed mellow gleams among its placid rotundities and upon the colored glass in the fanlight high in the western wall.

But that was November, the season of hazy, languorous days, when the first flush of autumn was over and winter beneath the sere horizon breathed yet a spell November, when the year like a shawled matron among her children dies peacefully, without pain and of no disease. Early in December the rains came and the year turned gray beneath the season of dissolution and of death. All night and all day it whispered upon the roof and along the eaves; the leafless trees gestured their black and sorrowful branches in it: only a lone stubborn hickory at the foot of the park kept its leaves yet, gleaming like a sodden flame against the eternal azure; beyond the valley the hills were hidden within chill veils of it.

Almost daily, despite Miss Jenny’s strictures and commands and the grave and passive protest in Narcissa’s eyes, Bayard went out with a shotgun and the two dogs, to return just before dark, wet to the skin. And cold; his lips would be chill on hers, and his eyes bleak and haunted, and in the yellow firelight of their room she would cling to him, or lie crying quietly in the darkness beside his rigid body with a ghost between them.

“Look here,” Miss Jenny said, coming upon her as she sat brooding before the fire in old Bayard’s den.

“You spend too much time this way; you’re getting moony. Stop worrying about him: he’s spent half his life soaking wet, yet he never had a cold that I can remember.”

“Hasn’t he?” the answered listlessly. Miss Jenny stood beside her chair, watching her keenly. Then she laid her hand on Narcissa’s head, quite gently, for a Sartoris.

“Are you worrying because maybe he don’t love you like you think he ought to?”

“It isn’t that,” she answered. “He doesn’t love anybody. He won’t even love the baby. He doesn’t seem to be glad, or sorry, or anything.”

“No,” Miss Jenny agreed The fire crackled and leaped among the resinous logs. Beyond the window the day dissolved endlessly. “listen,’? Miss Jenny said abruptly. “Don’t you ride in that car with him any more. You hear?”

“No. It won’t make him drive slowly. Nothing will.”

“Of course not. Nobody believes it will, not even Bayard. He goes along for the same reason that boy himself does. Sartoris. It’s in the blood. Savages, every one of ‘em. No earthly use to anyone” Together they gazed into the leaping flames, Miss Jenny’s hand still lying on Narcissa’s head. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”

“You didn’t do it. Nobody got me into it. I did it myself.”

“H’m,” Miss Jenny said. And then: “Would you do it over again?” The other didn’t answer, and she repeated the question. “Would you?”

“Yes,” Narcissa answered. “Don’t you know I would?” Again there was silence between them, in which without words they sealed their hopeless pact with that fine and passive courage of women throughput the world’s history. Narcissa rose. “I believe I’ll go to town and spend the day with Horace, if you don’t mind,” she said.

“All right,” Miss Jenny agreed. “I believe I would, too. Horace probably needs a little looking after, by now. He looked sort of gaunt when he was out here last week. Like he wasn’t getting proper food.”

When she entered the kitchen door Eunice, the cook, turned from the bread board and lifted her daubed hands in a soft dark gesture. “Well, Miss Narcy,” she said, “we ain’t seed you in a month. Is you come all de way in de rain?”

“I came in the carriage. It was too wet for the car.” She entered the kitchen. Eunice watched her with grave pleasure. “How are you all getting along?”

“He gits enough to eat, all right,” Eunice answered. “I sees to dat. But I has to make ‘im eat it. He needs you back here.”

“I’m here, for the day, anyhow. What have you got for dinner?” Together they lifted lids and peered into the simmering vessels on the stove and in the oven. “Oh, chocolate pie!”

“I has to toll ‘im wid dat,” Eunice explained. “He’ll eat anything, ef I jes’ makes ‘im a chocolate pie,” she added proudly.

“I bet he does,” Narcissa agreed. “Nobody can make chocolate pies like yours.”

“Dis one ain’t turnt out so well,” Eunice said, deprecatory. “I ain’t so pleased wid it.”

‘Why, Eunice! It’s perfect.”

“No’m, it ain’t up to de mark,” Eunice insisted. But she beamed, gravely diffident, and for a few minutes the two of them talked amicably while Narcissa pried into cupboards and boxes.

Then she returned to the house and mounted to her room. The dressing table was bare of its intimate silver and crystal, and the drawers were empty, and the entire room with its air of still and fading desolation, reproached her. Chill, too; there had been no fire in the grate since last spring, arid on the table beside the bed, in a blue vase, was a small faded bunch of flowers, forgotten and withered and dead. Touching them, they crumbled in her fingers, leaving a stain, and the water in the vase smelled of rank decay. She opened a window and threw them out.

The room was too chill to stop in long, and she decided to ask Eunice to build a fire on the hearth, for the sake of that part of her which still lingered here, soberly and a little sorrowful in the chill and reproachful desolation. At her chest of drawers she paused again and remembered those letters, fretfully and with a little brooding alarm, deprecating anew her carelessness in not destroying them. But maybe she had, and so entered again into the closed circle of her first fear and bewilderment, trying to remember what she had done with them. But she was certain she had left them in the drawer with her under-things, positive that she had put them there. Yet she had never been able to find them, nor had Eunice nor Horace seen them. The day she had missed them was the day before her wedding, when she packed her things. That day she had missed them, finding in their stead one in a different handwriting, which she did not remember having received. The gist of it was plain enough, although she had not understood some of it literally. But on that day, she read it with tranquil detachment: it and all it implied was definitely behind her now. And lacking even this, she would not have been shocked if she had comprehended it. Curious, a little perhaps, at some, of the words, but that is all,

But what she had done with those other letters she could not remember, and not being able to gave her moments of definite fear when she considered the possibility that people might learn that someone had thought such things about her and put them into words. Well, they were gone; there was nothing to do save hope that she had destroyed them as she had the last one, or if she had not, to trust that they would never be found. Yet that brought back the original distaste and dread: the possibility that the intactness of her deep and heretofore inviolate serenity might be the sport of circumstance; that she must trust to chance against the eventuality of a stranger casually raising a stray bit of paper from the ground...

But she would put this firmly aside, for the time being, at least. This should be Horace’s day, and her -own too; a surcease from that ghost-ridden dream to which she clung, waking. She descended the stairs. There was a fire in the living room. It had burned down to embers, however, and she put coal on it and punched it to a blaze. That would be the first thing he’d see when he entered; perhaps he’d wonder; perhaps he’d know before he entered, having sensed her presence. Then she considered ‘phoning him, and she mused indecisively for a moment before the fire; then decided to let it be a surprise. But supposing he didn’t come home to dinner. She considered this, and pictured him walking along a street in the rain, and immediately and with instinctive foreknowledge of what she would find, she went to the closet beneath the stairs and opened the door. It was as she had known: his overcoat and raincoat both hung there; the chances were he didn’t even have an umbrella, and again irritation and exasperation and untroubled affection for him welled in her, and it was as it had been of old again, and all that had since happened to them rolled away.

Heretofore her piano had always been moved into the living room when cold weather came. But this year it stood yet in the smaller alcove. There was a fireplace here, but no fire had been lighted yet, and the room was chilly. Beneath her hands the cold keys gave forth a sluggish chord, accusing, reproving too; and she returned to the fire again and stood before it where she could see through the window the drive beneath its sombre, dripping trees. The small clock on the mantel behind her chimed twelve, and she went to the window and stood with her nose touching the chill glass and her-breath misting it over. Soon, now: he was erratic in his hours, but never tardy, and every time an umbrella came into sight, her heart leaped a little. But it was not he, and she followed the bearer’s plodding passage until he shifted the umbrella enough for her to see who it was and so did not see Horace until he was half way up the drive. His hat was turned down around his face and his coat collar was hunched to his ears, and as she had known, he didn’t even have an umbrella.

“Oh, you idiot,” she said and ran to the door and through the curtained glass she saw his shadowy shape come leaping up the steps. He flung the door open and entered, whipping his sodden hat against his leg, and so did not see her until she stepped forth. “You idiot,” she said. “Where’s your raincoat?”

For a moment he stared at her with his wild and diffident repose, then he said “Narcy!” and his face lighted and he swept her into his wet arms.

“Don’t!” she cried. “You’re wet!” But he swung her from the floor, against his sodden chest, repeating Narcy, Narcy; then his cold nose was against her face and she tasted rain.

“Narcy,” he said again, tagging her, and she ceased trying to free herself and clung to him. Then abruptly he released her and jerked his head up and stared at her with sober intensity.

“Narcy,” he said, still staring at her, “has that surly black-guard...?”

“No, of course not,” she answered sharply. “Have you gone crazy?” Then she clung to. him again, wet clothes and all, as though she would never let him go. “Oh, Horry,” she said, “I’ve been a beast to you!”

“I was hoping” he said—they had eaten the chocolate pie and Horace now stood before the living-room fire, his coffee cup on the mantel, striking matches to his pipe, “that you might have come home for good! That they had sent you back.”

“No,” she answered. “I wish…”

“What?”

But she only said: “You’ll be having somebody, soon.” And then: “When is it to be, Horry?”

He sucked intently at his pipe; in his eyes little twin match flames rose and fell. “I don’t know. Next spring, I suppose. Whenever she will.”

“You don’t want to,” she stated quietly. “Not after what it’s all got to be now.”

“She’s in Reno now,” he added, puffing at his pipe, his face averted a little. “Little Belle wrote me a letter about mountains.”

She said: “Poor Harry.” She sat with her chin in her palms, gazing into the fire.

“He’ll have little Belle,” he reminded her. “He cares more for her than be does for Belle, anyway.”

“You don’t know,” she told him soberly. “You just say that because you want to believe it”

“Don’t you think he’s well off, rid of a-woman who doesn’t want him, who doesn’t even love his child very much?”

“You don’t know,” she repeated. “People can’t—can’t—You can’t play fast and loose with the way things ought to go on, after they’ve started off.”

“Oh, people.” He raised the cup and drained it, and sat down. “Barging around through a lifetime, clotting for no reason, breaking apart for no reason still. Chemicals. No need to pity a chemical.”

“Chemicals,” she mused, her serene face rosy in the firelight. “Chemicals. Maybe that’s the reason so many of the things people do smell bad.”

“Well, I don’t know that I ever thought of it in exactly that way,” he answered gravely. “But I daresay you’re right, having femininity on your side.” He brooded himself, restlessly. “But I suppose it’s all sort of messy: living and seething corruption glossed over for a while by smoothly colored flesh; all foul, until the clean and. naked bone.” He mused again, she quietly beside him. “But it’s something there, something you go after; must; driven. Not always swine. A plan somewhere, I suppose, known to Whoever first set the fermentation going. Perhaps ifs just too big to be seen, like a locomotive is a porous mongrel substance without edges to the grains of sand that give it traction on wet rails. Or perhaps He has forgotten Himself what the plan was.”

“But do you like to think of a woman who’ll willingly give up her child in order to marry another man a little sooner?”

“Of course I don’t. But neither do I like to remember that I have exchanged you for Belle, or that she has red hair and is going to be fat someday, or that she has lain in another pan’s arms and has a child that isn’t mine, even though she did voluntarily give it up. Yet there are any number of virgins who love children walking the world today, some of whom look a little like you, probably, and a modest number of which I allow myself to believe, without conceit, that I could marry. And yet...” He struck another match to his pipe, but he let it go out again and sat forward in his chair, the pipe held loosely in his Joined hands. “That may be the secret, after all. Not any subconscious striving after what we believed will be happiness, contentment; but a sort of gadfly urge after the petty, ignoble impulses which man has tried so vainly to conjure with words out of himself. Nature, perhaps, watching him as he tries to wean himself away from the rank and richly foul old mire that spawned him, biding her time and flouting that illusion of purifaction which he has foisted upon himself and calls his soul. But it’s something there, something you—you—” He brooded upon the fire, holding his cold pipe. She put her hand out and touched his, and he clasped it and looked at her with his groping and wid6 intensity. But she was gazing into the fire, her cheek in her palm, and she drew his hand to her and stroked it on her face.

“Poor Horry,” she said.

“Not happiness,” he repeated. “I’m happier now than I’ll ever be again. You don’t find that, when you suddenly swap the part of yourself which you want least, for the half of someone else that he or she doesn’t want. Do you? Did you find it?”

But she only said “Poor Horry” again. She stroked his hand slowly against her cheek as she stared into the shaling ruby of the coals. The clock chimed again, with blent small silver bells. She spoke without moving. “

“Aren’t you going back to the office this afternoon?”

“No.” His tone was again the grave, lighter casual one which he employed with her. “Tin taking a holiday, Next time you come, I may have a “case and cant.”

“You never have cases: you have functions,” she answered. “But I don’t think you ought to neglect your business,” she added with grave reproof.

“Neither do I,” he agreed. “But whatever else is business for, then?”

“Don’t besilly...Put on some coal, Horry.”

But later he reverted again to his groping and tragic premonitions. They had spent the afternoon sitting before the replenished fire; later she had gone to the kitchen and made tea. The day still dissolved ceaselessly and monotonously without, and they sat and talked in a sober and happy isolation from their acquired ghosts, and again their feet chimed together upon the dark road and, their faces turned inward to one another’s the sinister and watchful trees were no longer there. But the road was in reality two roads become parallel for a brief mile and soon to part again, and now and then their feet stumbled.

“It’s having been younger once,” he said. “Being dragged by time out of a certain day like a kitten from a tow sack, being thrust into another sack with shreds of the first one sticking to your claws. Like the burro that the prospector keeps on loading down with a rock here and a rock there until it drops, leaving him in the middle of his desert, surrounded by waiting buzzards,” he added, musing in metaphors. “Plunder. That’s all it is. If you could just be translated every so often, given a blank, fresh start, with nothing to remember, Dipped in Lethe every decade or so…”

“Or every year,” she added. “Or day.”

“Yes.” The rain dripped and dripped, thickening the twilight; the room grew shadowy. The fire had burned down again; its steady fading glow fell upon. their musing faces and brought the tea things on the low table beside them, out of the obscurity in quiet rotund gleams; and they sat hand in hand in the fitful shadows and the silence, waiting for something. And at last it came: a thundering knock at the door, and they knew then what it was they waited for, and through the window they saw the carriage curtains gleaming in the dusk and the horses stamping and steaming on the drive, in the ceaseless rain.