Flags in the Dust

3

Horace had seen her on the street twice, his attention caught by the bronze splendor of her hair and by an indefinable something in her air, her carriage. It was not boldness and not arrogance (exactly, but a sort of calm, lazy contemptuousness that left him seeking in his mind after an experience lost somewhere within the veils of years that swaddled his dead childhood; an experience so sharply felt at the time that the recollection of it lingered yet somewhere just beneath his consciousness although the motivation of its virginal clarity was lost beyond recall The wakened ghost of it was so strong that during the rest of the day he roused from periods of abstraction to find that he had been searching for it a little fearfully among the crumbled and long unvisited corridors of his mind, and later as he sat before his fire at home, with a book. Then, as he lay in bed thinking of Belle and waiting for sleep, he remembered it.

He was five years old and his father had taken him to his first circus, and dinging to the man’s hard, reassuring hand in a daze of blaring sounds and sharp cries and scents that tightened his small entrails with a sense of fabulous and unimaginable imminence and left him a little sick, he raised his head and found a tiger watching him with yellow and lazy contemplation; and while his whole small body was a tranced and soundless scream, the animal gaped and flicked its lips with an unbelievably pink tongue. It was an old tiger and toothless, and it had doubtless gazed through these same bars at decades and decades of Horaces, yet in him a thing these many generations politely dormant waked shrieking, and again for a red moment he dangled madly by his hands from the lowermost limb of a tree.

That was it^ and though that youthful reaction was dulled now by the years, he found himself watching her on the street somewhat as a timorous person is drawn with delicious revulsions to gaze into a window filled with knives. He found himself thinking of her often, wondering who she was. A stranger, he had never seen her in company with anyone who might identify her. She was always alone and always definitely going somewhere; not at all as a transient, a visitor idling about the streets. And always that air of hers, lazy, predatory and coldly contemptuous. The sort of woman men stare after on the street and who does not even do them the honor of ignoring them.

The third time he saw her he was passing a store, a newly opened department store, just as she emerged at that free, purposeful gait he had come to know. In the center of the door all was a small iron ridge onto which the double doors locked, and she caught the heel of her slipper on this ridge and emerged stumbling in. a cascade of small parcels, and swearing. It was a man’s bold swearing, and she caught her balance and stamped her foot and kicked one of her dropped parcels savagely into the gutter. Horace retrieved it and turning saw her stooping for the others, and together they gathered them up and rose, and she glanced at him briefly with level eyes of a thick, dark brown and shot with golden lights somehow paradoxically cold.

“Thanks,” she said, without emphasis, taking the packages from him. “They ought to be jailed for having a mantrap like that in the door.” Then she looked at him again, a level stare without boldness or rudeness. “You’re Horace Benbow, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Yes, that is my name. But I don’t believe—”

She was counting her packages. “One more yet,” she said, glancing about her feet. “Must be in the street.” He followed her to the curb, where she had already picked up the other parcel, and she regarded its muddy side and swore again. “Now I’ll have to have it rewrapped.”

“Yes, too bad, isn’t it?” he agreed. “If you’ll allow me—”

“I’ll have it done at the drug store. Come along, if you’re not too busy. I want to talk to you.”

She seemed to take it for granted that he would follow, and he did so, with curiosity and that feeling stronger than ever of a timorous person before a window of sharp knives. When he drew abreast of her she looked at him again (she was almost as tall as he) from beneath her level brows. Her face was rather thin, with broad nostrils. Her mouth was flat though full, and there was in the ugly distinction of her face in indescribable something; a something boding and leashed, yet untamed. Carnivorous, he thought. A lady tiger in a tea gown; and remarking something of his thoughts in his face, she said: “I forgot: of course you don’t know who I am; I’m Belle’s sister.”

“Oh, of course. You’re Joan. I should have known.”

“How? Nobody yet ever said we look alike. And you never saw me before.”

“No,” he agreed, “but I’ve been expecting for the last three months that some of Belle’s kinfolks would be coming here to see what sort of animal I am.”

“They wouldn’t have sent me, though,” she replied. “You can be easy on that.” They went on long the street. Horace responded to greetings, but he strode on with that feline poise of hers; he was aware that men turned to look after her, but in her air there was neither awareness nor disregard of it, conscious or otherwise. And again he remembered that tiger yawning with bored and lazy contempt while round and static eyes stared down its cavernous pink gullet. “I want to stop here “ she said, as they reached the drug store. “Do you have to go back to the store, or whatever it is?”

“Office,” he corrected. “Not right away.”

“That’s right,” she agreed, and he swung the door pen for her, “you’re a dentist, aren’t you? Belle told me.”.

“Then I’m afraid she’s deceiving us both,” he angered drily. She glanced at him with her level, speculative gaze, and he added:. “She’s got the names confused arid sent you to the wrong man.”

“You seem to be clever,” she said over her shoulder, “and I despise clever men. Don’t you know any better than to waste cleverness on women? Save it for your friends.” A youthful clerk in a white jacket approached, staring at her boldly; she asked him with contemptuous politeness to rewrap her parcel. Horace stopped beside her.

“Women friends?” he asked.

“Women what?” She stooped down, peering into a showcase of cosmetics; “Well, maybe so,” she said indifferently. “But I never believe ‘em, though. Cheap sports.” She straightened up. “Belle’s all right, if that’s what you want to ask. It’s done her good. She doesn’t look so bad-humored and settled down, now. Sort of fat and sullen.”

“I’m glad you think that. But what I am wondering is, how you happened to come here. Harry’s living at the hotel, isn’t he?”

“He’s opened the house again, now. He just wanted somebody to talk to. I came to see what you look like,” she told him.

“What I look like?”

“Yes. To see the man that could make old Belle kick over the traces.” Her eyes were coldly contemplative, a little curious. “What did you do to her? I’ll bet you haven’t even got any money to speak of.”

Horace grinned a little. “I must seem rather thoroughly impossible to you, then,” he suggested.

“Oh, there’s no accounting for the men women pick out. I sometimes wonder at myself. Only I’ve never chosen one I had to nurse, yet” The clerk returned with her package, and she made a trifling purchase and gathered up her effects. “I suppose you have to stick around your office all day, don’t you?”

“Yes. It’s the toothache season now, you know.”

“You sound like a college boy, now,” she said coldly. “I suppose Belle’s ghost will let you out at night, though?”

“It goes along too,” he answered.

“Well. I’m not afraid of ghosts; I carry a few around, myself.”

“You mean dripping flesh and bloody bones, don’t you?” She looked at him again, with her flecked eyes that should have been warm but were not

“I imagine you could be quite a nuisance,” she told him. He opened the door and she passed through it. And gave him a brief nod, and while he stood on the street with his hat lifted she strode on, without even a conventional Thank you or Goodbye.

That evening while he sat at his lonely supper, she telephoned him, and thirty minutes later she came in Harry’s car for him. And for the next three hours she drove him about while he sat hunched into his overcoat against the raw air. She wore no coat herself and appeared impervious to the chill, and she carried him on short excursions into the muddy winter countryside, the car sliding and skidding while he sat with tensed anticipatory muscles. But mostly they drove monotonously around town while he felt more and more like a faded and succulent eating-creature in a suave parading cage. Sometimes she talked, but usually she drove in a lazy preoccupation, seemingly utterly oblivious of him.

Later, when she had begun coming to his house, coming without secrecy and with an unhurried contempt for possible eyes and ears and tongues—a contempt that also disregarded Horace’s acute unease on that score, she still fell frequently into those periods of aloof and purring “repose. Then, sitting before the fire in his living room, with the bronze and electric disorder of her hair and the firelight glowing in little red points in her unwinking eyes, she was like a sheathed poniard, like Chablis in a tall-stemmed glass. At these times she would utterly ignore him, cold and inaccessible. Then she would rouse and talk brutally of her lovers. Never of herself, other than to give him the salient points in her history that Belle had hinted at with a sort of belligerent prudery. The surface history was brief and simple enough. Married at eighteen to a man three times her age, she had deserted him in Honolulu and fled to Australia with an Englishman, assuming his name; was divorced by her husband, discovered by first-hand experience that no Englishman out of his .native island has any honor about women; was deserted by him in Bombay, and in Calcutta, she married again. An American, a young man, an employee of Standard Oil company. A year later she divorced him, and since then her career had been devious and a little obscure, due to her restlessness. Her family would know next to nothing of her whereabouts, receiving her brief, infrequent letters from random points half the world apart. Her first husband had made a settlement on her, and from time to time and without warning she returned home and spent a day or a week or a month in the company of her father’s bitter reserve and her mother’s ready tearful uncomplaint, while neighbors, older people who had known her all her life, girls with whom she had played in pinafores and boys with whom she had sweethearted during the spring and summer of adolescence, and newcomers to the town, looked after her on the street.

Forthright and inscrutable and unpredictable: sometimes she stayed an hour motionless before the fire while he sat nearby and did not dare touch her; sometimes she lay beside him while the firelight, fallen to a steady glow of coals, filled his bedroom with looming and motionless shadows until midnight or later, talking about her former lovers with a brutality that caused him hopeless and despairing anger and something of a child’s hurt disillusion; speaking of them with that same utter lack of vanity and conventional modesty with which she discussed her body, asking him to tell her again that he thought her body beautiful, asking him if he had ever seen a match for her legs, then taking him with a savage and carnivorous suddenness that left him spent. Yet all the while remote beyond that barrier of cold inscrutability which he was never able to break downs and rising at last, again that other feline and inaccessible self and departing without even the formality of a final kiss or a Goodbye and leaving him to wonder/ despite the evidences of her presence, whether he had not dreamed it, after all.

She made but one request of him: that he refrain from talking to her of love. “I’m tired of having to listen to it and talk and act a lot of childish stupidity,” she explained. “I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t care to.”

“You don’t think there is any such thing?” he asked.

“I’ve never found it. And if we can get anything from each other worth having, what’s the use in talking about it? And it’ll take a race of better people than we are to bear it, if there’s any such thing. Save that for Belle: you’ll probably need it.”

One night she did not depart at all That was the night she revealed another feline trait: that of a prowling curiosity about dark rooms. She had paused at Narcissa’s door, and although he tried to draw her onward, she opened the door and found the light switch and pressed it on. “Whose room is this?”

“Narcissa’s,” he answered shortly. “Come away.”

“Oh, your sister’s. The one that married that Sartoris” She examined the room quietly. “I’d like to have known that man,” she said in a musing tone. “I think I’d be good for him, Marrying women, then leaving them after a month or two. Only one man ever left me,” she stated calmly. “I was practically a child, or that wouldn’t have...Yes, I’d have been just the thing for him.” She entered the room; he followed and took her arm again.

“Come away, Joan.”

“But I don’t know,” she added. “Maybe it’s a good thing he’s gone, after all. For both of us.”

“Yes. Come away.”

She turned her head and stared at him with her level inscrutable eyes, beneath the bronze disorder of her hair. “Men are funny animals” she said. “You carry so much junk around with you.” There was in her eyes a cold derisive curiosity. “What do you call it? sacrilege? desecration?”

“Come away,” he repeated.

Next day, in the gray December forenoon among the musty books in his office, the reaction found him. It was more than reaction: it was revulsion, and he held a spiritual stock-taking with a sort of bleak derision: for a moment, in company with the sinister gods themselves, he looked down upon Horace Benbow as upon an antic and irresponsible worm. It was worse; it was conduct not even becoming a college sophomore—he, who had thought to have put all such these ten years behind him; and he thought of his sister and he felt unclean. On the way home at noon he saw Harry Mitchell approaching, and he ducked into a store and hid—a thing Belle had never caused him to do.

He would not go to his room, where the impact of her presence must yet linger, and Eunice served his meal with her face averted, emanating disapproval and reproach; and he angered slowly and asked her the direct question. “Has Mrs. Heppleton gone yet, Eunice?”

“I don’t know, suh,” Eunice answered, still without looking at him. She turned doorward.

“You don’t know when she left?”

“I don’t know, suh,” Eunice repeated doggedly, and the swing door slapped behind her in dying oscillations.

But he would not mount to his room, and soon he was back down town again. It was a gray, raw day, following the two recent weeks of bright frosty weather. Christmas was not a Week away, and already the shop windows bloomed in toy fairylands, with life in its mutations in miniature among cedar branches and cotton batting and dusted over with powdered tinsel, amid which Santa Claus in his myriad avatars simpered in fixed and rosy benignance; and with fruit and cocoanuts and giant sticks of peppermint; and fireworks of all kinds—roman candles and crackers and pinwheels; and about the muddy square fetlock-deep horses stood hitched to wagons laden with berried holly and mistletoe.

He was too restless to remain in one place, and through the short afternoon, on trivial pretexts or on no pretext at all, he descended the stairs and walked along the streets among the slow throngs of black and white in the first throes of the long winter vacation; and at last he realized that he was hoping to see her, realized it with longing and with dread, looking along the street before him for a glimpse of her shapeless marten coat and the curbed wild blaze of her hair, and the lithe and purposeful arrogance of her carriage, ready to flee when he did so.

But by the time he reached home in the early dusk the dread was still there, but it was only the savor of the longing, and without even pausing to remove his hat and coat he went to the telephone in its chill and darkling alcove beneath the stairs. And he stood with the chill receiver to his ear and watching the cloudy irregularity of his breath upon the nickel mouthpiece, waiting until out of the twilight and the chill the lazy purring of her voice should come. After a time he asked central to ring again, with polite impatience. He could hear the other instrument shrill again and he thought of her long body rising from its warm nest in her chair before a fire somewhere in the quiet house, imagined lie could hear her feet on stairs nearer and nearer “Now. Now she is lifting her hand to the receiver now Now.” But it was Rachel, the cook. Naw, suh, Miz Heppleton ain’t here. Yes, suh, she gone away. Suh? Naw, suh, she ain’t comin’ back. She went off on de evenin’ train. Naw, suh, Rachel didn’t know where she was going.

It used to be that he’d fling his coat and hat down and Narcissa would come along presently and hang them up. But already bachelordom was getting him house-broke—accomplishing what affection never had and never would—and he hung his coat, in the pocket of which an unopened letter from Belle lay forgotten, carefully in the closet beneath the stairs, fumbling patiently with his chilled hands until he found a vacant hook. Then he mounted the stairs and opened his door and entered the cold room where between the secret walls she lingered yet in a hundred palpable ways—in the mirror above his chest of drawers, in the bed, the chairs; on the deep rug before the hearth where she had crouched naked and drowsing like a cat. The fire had burned out; the ashes were cold and the room was icy chill: outside, the graying twilight. He built up the fire and drew his chair close to the hearth and sat before it, his thin delicate hands spread to the crackling blaze.