Flags in the Dust

William Faulkner

FLAGS IN THE DUST

1929(Edited as Sartoris)

1973 (Restored, Uncut)

Introduction

In the autumn or winter of 1926, William Faulkner, twenty-nine, began work on the first of his novels about Yoknapatawpha County. Sherwood Anderson had told him some time before that he should write about his native Mississippi, and now Faulkner took that advice: he used his own land, and peopled it with men and women who were partly drawn from real life, and partly depicted as they should have been in some ideal mythopoeic structure. A year later, on September 29, 1927, the new novel was completed. It was 596 pages long in transcript, and he called it Flags in the Dust. Full of enthusiasm, Faulkner sent Flags in the Dust up to Horace Liveright (who had published his first two novels) in New York. Liveright read it, disliked it, and sent it back with his firm recommendation that Faulkner not try to offer it for publication anywhere else: it was too diffuse, too lacking in plot and structure; and, Liveright felt, no amount of revision would be able to salvage it. Faulkner, crushed, showed Flags in the Dust to several of his friends, who shared Liveright’s opinion.

But he still believed that this would be the book that would make his name as a writer, and for several months he tried to edit it himself, sitting at his work-table in Oxford. Finally, discouraged, he sent a new typescript off to Ben Wasson, his agent in New York.

“Will you please try to sell this for me?” he asked Wasson. “I can’t afford all the postage it’s costing me.” In the meantime, convinced that he would never become a successful novelist, Faulkner began work on a book that he was sure would never mean anything to anyone but himself: The Sound and the Fury.

Wasson tried eleven publishers, all of whom rejected Flags in the Dust. Finally he gave the typescript to Harrison Smith, then an editor of Harcourt, Brace & Company. Smith liked it, and showed it to Alfred Harcourt, who agreed to publish it, provided that someone other than Faulkner perform the extensive cutting job that Harcourt felt was necessary. For fifty dollars, Wasson agreed to pare down his client’s novel. On September 20,1928, Faulkner received a contract for the book, now to be called Sartoris (no one knows who changed its name), which was to be about 100,000 words long, and which was to be delivered to Harcourt; Brace sixteen days later. Faulkner left immediately for New York, presumably to help Wasson with his revision.

But when he sat down in Wasson’s apartment to observe the operation on his novel, Faulkner found himself unable to participate. If it were cut, he felt, it would die. Wasson persisted, however, pointing out that the trouble with Flags in the Dust was that it was not one novel, but six, all struggling along simultaneously. This, to Faulkner, was praise: evidence of fecundity and fullness of vision, evidence that the world of Yoknapatawpha was rich enough to last. As he later wrote of his third novel, “I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it” Nevertheless, Wasson kept Ms bargain with Alfred Harcourt. For the next two weeks, whileFaulkner sat nearby writing The Sound and the Fury, Wasson went through the typescript of Flags in the Dust, making cuts of every sort until almost a fourth of the book had been excised. Harcourt, Brace published this truncated version on January 31, 1929, as Sartoris (with a dedication: “To Sherwood Anderson through whose kindness I was first published, with the belief that this book will give him no reason to regret that fact”), and the old Flags in the Dust was soon forgotten—by everyone but Faulkner.

He had preserved the original holograph manuscript of Flags in the Dust, 237 pages in his neat but minuscule and almost illegible hand; and he had bound together with thin wire the 596 pages of a sort of composite typescript of the novel, produced by the combination of three separate but overlapping typescript drafts. The first of these, 447 pages long, seems to have been begun before he completed his manuscript version. The second, ‘’ pages of which are in the composite typescript, was probably written after he had completed the manuscript and the first typescript. In the third, 146 pages appear to have been a revision of the second typescript. Why Faulkner should have labored over the reconstruction of this text is not clear: perhaps he thought of his composite typescript as a working draft which would allow him ultimately to restore to his novel that which Wasson had carved from it—or perhaps, fastidious man that he was, he simply could not bring himself to throw away all of those typed pages. In any case, the manuscript and typescript both were eventually deposited at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, where they lay more or less undisturbed until Mrs. Jill Summers, Faulkner’s daughter, remembered that her late father had spoken often of a restoration ofFlags in the Dust. Mrs. Summers asked this writer and Albert Erskine, editor at Random House, to undertake the task.

The result is, now, Flags in the Dust, which aims at being a faithful reproduction of that composite typescript. Certain nonsubstantive alterations in spelling and punctuation have been made, in order to bring this novel into conformity with Faulkner’s other books; but wherever possible his many idiosyncrasies, especially those on which he himself insisted during his years of working with editors at Random House, were allowed to stand. The final complete typescript, which must have served as setting copy for the Harcourt, Brace edition of Sartoris (and which must have been the draft in which Wasson made his cuts), has not survived, nor have any galley proofs. All we had to work from, then, was the composite typescript, by any scholar’s standards a suspect source. There was no way, finally, to tell which of the many differences between Flags in the Dust andSartoris were the result of Faulkner’s emendations in the hypothetical setting copy and the galley proofs, and which belonged to Wasson. If there were to be any publication of Flags in the Dust at all, then, it had to be what we have here provided.

Whether it is better than Sartoris, as Faulkner so firmly believed it to be, is of course a matter of taste. It is tempting to launch into a study of the genesis and development of the novel, from the manuscript version through the typescript of Flags in the Dust to the publication of Sartoris; but this is not the place to do so. Suffice it here to suggestt that whereas Sartoris is chiefly about the Sartoris clan, their surly gallantry, and their utter and uncaring inability to adjust to the demands of whatever age they find themselves in, Flags in the Dust is far more complicated: primaryfocus is still on the Sartorises, but Faulkner clearly wished to make of his novel an anatomy of the entire Yoknapatawpha social structure, excluding only the Indians. As foils to the doomed and hawklike Bayard Sartoris, we have not only his dead twin, John, but Horace Benbow, too, as a sort of Delta dilettante; and Buddy MacCallum, the young hillman who possesses all the steady virtues Bayard lacks; Harry Mitchell, as the type of the new southern middle class—and even Byron Snopes, the desperate and reptilian representative of a new class threatening to overthrow the old aristocratic order of the area. All of these are present in Sartoris, to be sure; but in Flags in the Dust their roles are lengthened and heightened, until we realize that each of them is in his way a commentary not only upon Bayard Sartoris, but also upon the Deep South in the years after the First World War.

Flags in the Dust, then, may or may not be a better work of art than Sartoris; but few will dispute that it is a more complete fictional document of a time and place in history—or that it is a better introduction to the grand and complex southern world that William Faulkner was to write about until he died.

DOUGLAS DAY

University of Virginia

February, 1973

ONE

1

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

“Fourteen,” old Bayard answered.

“Hey?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bayard.”

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

“Bayard.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stuart gathered his reins, forward,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sinner riz fum de moaner’s bench,

Sinner jump to de penance bench;

When de preacher ax’im whut de reason why,

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

Oh, Lawd, Oh Lawd!

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Meant what, Miss Jenny?”

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

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

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

“Not children’s parties,” she protested.

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

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

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

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

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

“Miss Jenny!”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m still twenty-six, Miss Jenny,” the younger woman replied equably. Simon unhitched the team and stood at the carriage step in his Miss Jenny attitude. It differed from the bank one; in place of that leashed military imminence, it was now a gallant and slightly patronizing deference. Miss Jenny gazed at the still serenity of the younger woman’s face.

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

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

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

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

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

“Thankyou. Goodbye.”

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

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

“Whereis he?” Miss Jenny demanded immediately;

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

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

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

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

“I ain’t seed him neither,” Simon disclaimed. “Section han’ seed him jump off de train and tole me—”

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

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

“Well, where is he, then?”

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

“Drive on!” Miss Jenny said sharply.

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

One of the dogs was quite old and nearly blind. It spent most of the day lying in the sun in the backyard, or during the hot summer days, in the cool dusty obscurity beneath the kitchen floor. But toward the middle of the afternoon it went to the front of the house and waited there quietly until it heard the carriage coming up the drive, and when Bayard Sartoris had descended and passed into the house it returned to the back and waited again until Isom led the mare up to the back porch and Bayard Sartoris came out and mounted. Then together they spent the afternoon going quietly and unhurriedly about the grazing meadows and the planting or harvesting fields and the peaceful woodlands in their dreaming seasonal mutations—the man on his horse and the ticked setter gravely beside him, while the descending evening of their fives drew toward its peaceful close upon the kind land that had bred them both. The other dog was a two-year-old; his net was too hasty for the sedateness of their society overlong, and though at times he set forth with them or came quartering up, splashed and eager, from somewhere to join them in mid procession, he never remained very long but must presently dash away with lolling tongue and the tense delicate feathering of his tail in pursuit of the maddening elusive smells with which the world surrounded him and tempted him from beyond every thicket and copse and ravine,

Bayard Sartoris1 boots were wet to the tops and the soles were rimmed with mud, and he bent in intense preoccupation above his keg and bottle under the sober curiosity of the two dogs. The keg was propped in another chair with the bung upward and he was siphoning the rich liquor delicately into the decanter through a slender rubber tube. Miss Jenny came straight through the house and, entered the library with her black bonnet still perched on theexact top of her trim white head, and the two dogs looked up at her, the older with grave dignity, the younger one more quickly, tapping his tail on the floor with fawning diffidence. But Bayard Sartoris did not raise his head. Miss Jenny closed the door and gazed coldly at his boots.

“Your feet are wet,” she stated. Still he didn’t look up, but held the tube delicately in the bottle-neck, watching the clear brown liquor mount steadily in the decanter. At times Bayard Sartoris’ deafness was very convenient, more convenient than actual, perhaps; but who could know this certainly? “You go upstairs and get those boots off,” Miss Jenny commanded, coming into the room. “I’ll fill the decanter.”

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

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

“Has Simon come in yet?” he asked.

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

“No’m, dey ain’t wet,” Simon answered. But she bent and felt them herself.

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

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

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

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

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

“Simon says—” Bayard Sartoris repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All folks talkin’‘bout heavenain’t gwine dere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yessum,” he answered quietly.

“What’s that?” old Bayard demanded.

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

“What’s that?” old Bayard repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s the matter?” he said.

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

“I want a drink.”

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

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

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

“What time is it?”

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

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

“Get away,” he said ‘”Let me alone.”

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

TWO

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Caspey?” Miss Jenny repeated. “Ishe home?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Miss Jenny!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yessum.”

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

“You both looked so funny,” the younger womanexplained “You looked so much more like a soldierthan poor Isom, for all his uniform.” She touched her eyeswith her fingertips. “I’m sorry: please forgiveme for laughing.”

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

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

“Yessum, I ‘speck it is.”

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

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

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

“Yessum.”

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

“Yessum.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sho,” said Simon, impressed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He slowed in pacing Narcissa’s car where it stood on the drive and examined it with a disparagement too lazy to sneer even, then slouched on without quickening his pace.

“You, Caspey!”Miss Jenny called, raising her voice. But he went steadily on down the drive, insolent and slouching and unhurried. “He heard me,” she said ominously. “We’ll see about this when he comes back. Who was the fool anyway, who thought of putting niggers into the same uniform with white men? Mr. Vardaman knew better; he told those fools at Washington at the time that it wouldn’t do. But politicians!” She invested the innocent word with an utter and blasting derogation, “If I ever get tired of associating with gentlefolks, I know what I’ll do: I’ll run for Congress...Listen at me! tiradin’ again. I declare, at times I believe these Sartorises and all their possessions just set out to plague and annoy me. Thank the Lord, I won’t have to live with ‘em after I’m dead. I don’t know where they’ll be, but no Sartoris is going to stay in heaven any longer than he can help.”

The other laughed. “You seem very sure of your own destination, Miss Jenny”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” Miss Jenny demanded. “Haven’t I been storing up crowns and harps for a long time?” She shaded her eyes with her hand and stared down the drive. Caspey had reached the gate and he now stood beside the road, waiting for a ride to town. “Don’t you stop for him, you hear?” she said suddenly. “Why won’t you stay for dinner?”

“No,” the other answered. “I must get on home. Aunt Sally’s not well today…” She stood for a moment in the sunlight, with her hat and the basket of flowers on her arm, musing. Then with a motionof sudden decision she drew a folded paper from the front of her dress.

“Got another one, did you?” Miss Jenny asked, watching her. “Lemme see it.” She took the paper and opened it and stepped back out of the sun. Her nose glasses hung on a slender silk cord that rolled onto a spring in a small gold case pinned to her bosom. She snapped the cord out and set the glasses on her high-bridged nose, and behind them her gray eyes were cold and piercing as a surgeon’s.

The paper was a single sheet of unmarked foolscap; it bore writing in a frank, open script that at first glance divulged no individuality whatever; a hand youthful yet at the same time so blandly and neatly unsecretive that presently you speculated a little.

“You did not answer mine of 25th. I did not expect you would yet. You will answer soon. I can wait. I will not harm you. I am square and honest as you will learn when our ways come together. I do not expect you to answer Yet. But you know where.”

Miss Jenny refolded the paper with a gesture of fine and delicate distaste. “I’d burn this thing, if it wasn’t the only thing we have to catch him with. I’ll give it to Bayard tonight.”

“No, no,” the other protested quickly, extending her hand. “Please, not that. Let me have it and tear it up.”

“It’s our only evidence, child—this and the other one. We’ll get a detective.”

“No, no; please! I don’t want anybody else to know about it. Please, Miss Jenny.” She reached her hand again.

“You want to keep it,” Miss Jenny accused coldly.

“Just like a young fool of a woman, to be flattered over a thing like this.”

“I’ll tear it up,” the other repeated. “I would have sooner, but I wanted to tell someone. It—it—I thought I wouldn’t feel so filthy, after I had shown it to someone else. Let me have it, please.”

“Fiddlesticks. Why should you feel filthy? You haven’t encouraged it, have you?”

“Please, Miss Jenny.”

But Miss Jenny still held on to it. “Don’t be a fool,” she snapped. “How can this thing make you feel filthy? Any young woman is liable to get an anonymous letter. And a lot of ‘em like it We all are convinced that men feel that way about us, and we can’t help but admire one that’s got the courage to tell us about it, no matter who he is”

“If he’d just signed his name. I wouldn’t mind who it was. But like this...Please, Miss Jenny.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Miss Jenny repeated. “How can we find who it is, if you destroy the letter?”

“I don’t want to know.” Miss Jenny released the paper and Narcissa tore it into bits and cast them over the rail and rubbed her hands on her dress. “I don’t want to know. I want to forget all about it.”

“Nonsense. You’re dying to know, right now. I bet you look at every man you pass and wonder if it’s him. And as long as you don’t do something about it, it’ll go on. Get worse, probably. You better let me tell Bayard.”

“No, no. I’d hate for him to know, to think that I would—might have...It’s all right: I’ll just burn them up after this, without opening them...I must really go.”

“Of course: you’ll throw ‘em right into the stove,” Miss Jenny agreed with cold irony. Narcissa descended the steps and Miss Jenny came forward intothe sunlight again, letting her glasses snap back into the case. ‘It’s your business, of course. But Td not stand for it, if ‘twas me. But then, I ain’t twenty-six years old...Well, come out again when you get another one^ or you want some flowers.”

“Yes, I will. Thank you for these.”

“And let me know what you hear from Horace. Thank the Lord, it’s just a glass-blowing machine, and not a war widow.”

“Yes, I will. Goodbye.” She went on through the dappled shade in her straight white dress and her basket of flowers stippled against it, and got in her car. The top was back and she put her hat on and started the engine, and looked back again and waved her hand. “Goodbye.”

The negro had moved down the road, slowly, and had stopped again, and he was watching her covertly as she approached. As she passed him he looked full at her and she knew he was about to hail her. She opened the throttle and passed him with increasing speed and drove swiftly all the way to town, where she lived in at brick house among cedars on a hilt

She was arranging the larkspur in a dull lemon urn on the piano. Aunt Sally rocked steadily in Her chair beside the window, clapping her feet flatly on the floor at each stroke. Her work basket sat on the window ledge between the gentle billowing of the curtains, her ebony walking-stick leaned beside it.

“And you were out there two hours,” Aunt Sally said, “and you never saw him at all?”

“He wasn’t there,” Narcissa Answered. “He’s gone to Memphis.”

Aunt Sally rocked steadily. “If I was them, I’d make him stay there. I wouldn’t have that boyaround me, blood or no blood...What did he go to Memphis for? I thought that aeroplane what-do-you-call-it was broke up.”

“He went on business, I suppose.”

“What business has he got in Memphis? Bayard Sartoris has got more sense than to turn over any business to that wild fool.”

“I don’t know,” Narcissa answered, arranging the larkspur. “He’ll be back soon, I suppose. You can ask himthen.”

“Me ask him? I never said two words to him in his life. And I don’t want to. I been used to associating with gentlemen.”

Narcissa broke some of the stems, arranging the blooms in a pattern. “What’s he done that gentlemen don’t do, Aunt Sally?”

“Why, jumping off water tanks and going up in balloons just to scare folks. You think I’d have that boy around me? I’d have him locked up in the insane asylum, if I was Bayard and Jenny.”

“He didn’t jump off of the tank. He just swung off of it on a rope and dived into the swimming pool And it was John that went up in the balloon.”

“That wasn’t what I heard. I heard he jumped off that tank, across a whole line of freight cars and lumber piles and didn’t miss the edge of the pool an inch.”

“No he didn’t. He swung on a rope from the top of a house and then dived into the pool. The rope was tied to the tank.”

“Well, didn’t he have to jump over a lot of lumber and freight cars? And couldn’t he have broken his neck just as easy that way as jumping off the tank?”

“Yes,” Narcissa said.

“There! What’d I tell you? And what was the use ofit?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you don’t know. That was the reason he did it.” Aunt Sally rocked triumphantly for a while. Narcissa put the last touches to the blue pattern of the larkspur. A tortoise-shell cat bunched suddenly and silently in the window beside the work basket. Still crouching it blinked into the room for a moment, then it sank to the window sill and with arched neck fell to grooming its shoulder with a narrow pink tongue. Narcissa moved to the window and laid her hand on the creature’s sleek back.

“And then, going up in that balloon, when...”

“That wasn’t Bayard,” Narcissa repeated. “That was John.”

“That wasn’t what I heard. I heard it was the other one and that Bayard and Jenny were both begging him with tears in their eyes not to do it. I heard...”

“Neither one of them were there. Bayard wasn’t even there. It was John did it. He did it because the man that came with the balloon got sick. John went up in it so the country people wouldn’t be disappointed. I was there.”

“Stood there and let him do it, did you, when you could a telephoned Jenny or walked across the square to the bank and got Bayard? You stood there and never opened your mouth, did you?”

“Yes,” Narcissa answered. Stood there beside Horace in the slow, intent ring of country people, watching the globe swelling and tugging at its ropes, watched John Sartoris in a faded flannel shirt and corduroy breeches, while the carnival man explained the rip-cord and the parachute to him; stood there feeling her breath going out faster than she could draw it in and watched the thing lurch into the air with John sitting on a frail trapeze bar swingingbelow it, with eyes she could not close, saw the balloon and people and all swirl slowly upward and then found herself clinging to Horace behind the shelter of a wagon, trying to get her breath.

He landed three miles away in a brier thicket and disengaged the parachute and regained the road and hailed a passing negro in a wagon. A mile from town they met old Bayard driving furiously in the carriage and the two vehicles stopped side by side in the road while old Bayard in the one exhausted the accumulate fury of his rage and in the other his grandson sat in his shredded clothes and on his scratched face that look of one who has gained for an instant a desire so fine that its escape was a purification, not a loss.

The next day, as Narcissa was passing a store, he emerged with that abrupt violence which he had in common with his brother, pulling up short to avoid a collision with her.

“Oh, ex—Why, hello,” he said. Beneath the crisscrosses of tape his face was merry and wild, and his unruly hair was hatless. For a moment she gazed at him with wide, hopeless eyes, then she clapped her hand to her mouth and went swiftly on, almost running.

Then he was gone, with his brother, shut away by that foreign war as two noisy dogs are penned in a kennel far away, the bold, jolly face of him and his rough, shabby clothes. Miss Jenny gave her news of them, of the dull, dutiful letters they wrote home at sparse intervals; then he was dead. But far away beyond seas, and there was no body to be returned clumsily and tediously to earth, and so to her he seemed still to be laughing at that word as he had laughed at all the other mouthsounds that stood for repose, who had not waited for Time and its furniture to teach him that the end of wisdom is to dreamhigh enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

Aunt Sally rocked steadily in her chair.

“Well, it don’t matter which one it was. One’s bad as the other. But I reckon it ain’t their fault, raised like they were. Rotten spoiled, both of ‘em. Lucy Sartoris wouldn’t let anybody control ‘em while she lived. If they’d been mine, now...” She rocked on. “Beat it but of ‘em, I would. Raising two wild Indians like that. But those folks, thinking there wasn’t anybody quite as good as a Sartoris. Even Lucy Cranston, come from as good people as there are in the state, acting like it was divine providence that let her marry one Sartoris and be the mother of two more. Pride, false pride.”

She rocked steadily in her chair. Beneath Narcissa’s hand the cat purred with lazy arrogance.

“It was a judgment on ‘em, taking John instead of that other one. John at least tipped his hat to a lady on the street, but that other boy...” She rocked monotonously, dapping her feet flatly against the floor. “You better stay away from that; boy. He’ll be killing you same as he did he did that wife of his.”

“At least, give me benefit of clergy first, Aunt Sally,” Narcissa said. Beneath her hand, beneath the cat’s sleek hide, muscles flowed suddenly into, tight knots, like wire, and the animal’s bodyseemed to elongate as it whipped from beneath her hand and flashed out of sight across the veranda.

“Oh,” Narcissa said. Then she whirled and caught up Aunt Sally’s stick and ran from the room.

‘What—? Aunt Sally said. “You bring my stick back here,” she said. She sat staring at tie door, hearing the swift clatter of the other’s heels in the hall and then on the veranda. She rose and leaned in the window. “You bring my stick here,” she shouted.

Narcissa sped across the veranda and to the ground In the canna bed the cat, crouching, jerked its head back and its yellow unwinking eyes. Narcissa rushed at it, raising the stick,

“Put it down!” she cried. “Drop it!” For another second the yellow eyes glared at her, then the animal ducked its head and lept in a Jong fluid bound, the bird between its jaws.

“Oh-h-h, damn you! Damn you! You—you Sartoris!” and she hurled the stick after the final tortoise flash as the cat whipped around the corner of the house.

“You get my stick and bring it right back this minute!” Aunt Sally shouted through the window.

She had seen Bayard once from a distance. He appeared as usual at the time—a lean figure in casual easy clothes unpressed and at little comfortably shabby, and with his air of smoldering abrupt violence. He and his brother had both had this, but Bayard’s was a cold, arrogant sort of leashed violence, while in John it was a warmer thing, spontaneous and merry and wild. It was Bayard who had attached a rope to a ninety-foot water tank and, from the roof of the adjoining building, swung himself across the intervening fifty yards of piled lumber and freight cars and released the rope and dived into a narrow concrete swimming pool while upturned faces gaped and screamed-^a cold nicety of judgment and unnecessary cruel skill; John who, one County Fair day, made the balloon ascension, the aeronaut having been stricken with ptomaine poisoning, that the county people might not be disappointed, and landed three miles away in a brier thicket, losing most of his clothing and skin and returning to town cheerful and babbling in the wagon of a passing negro.

But both of these were utterly beyond her; it was not in her nature to differentiate between motives whose results were the same, and on occasions when she had seen them conducting themselves as civilized beings, had been in the same polite room with them, she found herself watching them with shrinking and fearful curiosity, as she might have looked upon wild beasts with a temporary semblance of men and engaged in human activities, morally acknowledging the security of the cage but spiritually unreassured.

But she had not seen them often. They were either away at school, or if at home they passed their headlong days in the country, coming into town at rare intervals and then on horseback, in stained corduroy and flannel shirts. Yet rumors of their doings came in to her from time to time, causing always in her that shrinking, fascinated distaste, that blending of curiosity and dread, as if a raw wind had blown into that garden wherein she dwelt. Then they would be gone again, and she would think of them only to remember Horace and his fine and electric delicacy, and to thank her gods he was not as they.

Then the war, and she learned without any surprise whatever that they had gone to it. That was exactly what they would do, and her nature drowsed again beneath the serene belief that they had been removed from her life for good and always; to her the war had been brought about for the sole purpose of removing them from her life as noisy dogs are shut up in a kennel afar off. Thus her days. Man became amphibious and lived in mud and filth and died and was buried in it; the world looked on in hysterical amazement. But she, within her walled and windless garden, thought of them only with a sober and pointless pity, like a flower’s exhalation, and like the flower, uncaring if the scent be sensed or not. She gave clothing and money to funds, and she knitted things also, but she did not know where Saloniki was and was incurious as to how Rheims or Przemysl were pronounced.

Then Horace departed, with his Snopes, and the war became abruptly personal But it was still not the same war to which the Sartoris boys had gone; and soon she was readjusted again, with Aunt Sally Wyatt in the house and the steady unemphasis of their feminine days. She joined the Red Cross and various other welfare organizations, and she knitted harsh wool with intense brooding skill and performed other labors while other women talked of their menfolks into her grave receptivity.

There was a family of country people moved recently to town—a young man and his pregnant wife and two infant children. They abode in a rejuvenated rented cabin on the edge of town, where the woman did her own housework,while the man was employed by the local distributor for an oil company, laboring all day with a sort of ^ager fury of willingness and a desire to get on. He was a steady, exemplary sort, willing and unfailingly good-natured “and reliable, so he was drafted immediately and denied exemption and ravished celeritously overseas. His family accompanied him to the station in an automobile supplied by the charity of an old lady of the town, and they watched him out of their lives with that tearless uncomplaining gravity of primitive creatures. The Red Cross took charge of the family, but Narcissa Benbow adopted them. She was present when the baby was born two weeks later, she superintended the household—meals and clothing—until the woman was about again, and for the next twelvemonths she wrote a monthly letter to the husband and father who, having no particular aptitude for it save his unflagging even temper and a ready willingness to do as he was told, was now a company cook in the S.O.S.

This occupation too was just a grave centering of her days; there was no hysteria in it, no conviction that she was helping to slay the biblical Beast, or laying up treasure in heaven. Horace was away too; she was waiting for him to return, marking time, as it were. Then Bayard Sartoris had returned home, with a wife. She sensed the romantic glamor of this with interest and grave approval, as of a dramatic scene, but that was all; Bayard Sartoris went away again. Narcissa met his wife now and then, and always with a little curiosity, as though, voluntarily associating so intimately with a Sartoris, she too must be an animal with the temporary semblance of a human being. There was no common ground between them, between Narcissa with her constancy, her serenity which the other considered provincial and a little dull, and the other with her sexless vivid unrepose and the brittle daring of her speech and actions.

She had learned of John Sartoris’ death without any emotion whatever except a faint sense of vindication, a sort of I-told-you-so feeling, which recurred (blended now with a sense of pitying outrage, blaming this too on Bayard) when Bayard’s wife died in childbirth in October of the same year, even though she stood with old Bayard’s deaf and arrogant back and Miss Jenny’s trim indomitability amid sad trees and streaming marble shapes beneath a dissolving afternoon. Then November, and bells and whistles and revolvers. Horace would be coming home soon now, she thought at the time. Before Christmas, perhaps. But before he did so she had seenBayard once on the street, and later, while she and Miss Jenny sat in Miss Jenny’s dim parlor one morning, he came unexpectedly to the door and stood there looking at her with his bleak and brooding gaze.

“It’s Bayard,”Miss Jenny said. “Come in here and speak to Narcissa, sonny.”

He said Hello and she turned on the piano bench, again with that feeling of curiosity and dread. ‘Who is it?” he said, and he came into the room, bringing with him like a raw wind that cold leashed violence which-she remembered.

“It’s Narcissa Benbow,” Miss Jenny repeated testily. “Go on and speak to her and stop acting like you don’t know who sheis.”

Narcissa gave him her hand and he stood holding it, but he was not looking at her. She withdrew her hand, and he glanced at her again, then away, and he loomed above them and stood rubbing his hand through his hair.

“I want a drink,” he said “I can’t find the key to thedesk.”

“Stop and talk to us a few minutes, and you can haveone.”

He stood for a moment above them, thenhemoved abruptly and before Miss Jenny could speakhe had dragged the holland envelope from another chair.

“Let that alone, you Indian!” Miss Jenny exclaimed. She rose. “Here, take my chair, if you’re too weak to stand up any longer. I’ll be back in a minute,” she added to Narcissa. “I’ll have to get my keys.”

He sat laxly in thechair, rubbing his hand through his hair, his gaze brooding somewhere about hisbooted feet. Narcissa sat utterly quiet, watching him with that blending of shrinking and fascination. She said at last:

“I am so sorry about John and your wife. I asked Miss Jenny to tell you when she wrote...”

He sat rubbing his head slowly, in the brooding violence of his temporary repose.

“You aren’t married yourself, are you?” he asked. She sat quietly, watching him. “Ought to try it,” he added. “Everybody ought to get married once, like everybody ought to go to one war.”

Miss Jenny returned with the keys, and he got his long abrupt body erect and left them. After that day, she called on Miss Jenny only when she was sure he was not at home.

2

It was a week before Caspey returned home. In the meantime young Bayard had driven out from Memphis in his car. Memphis was seventy-five miles away and the trip had taken an hour and forty minutes because some of the road was narrow clay country road. The car was long and low and gray; the four-cylinder engine had sixteen valves and eight sparkplugs, and the people had guaranteed that it would run eighty miles an hour, although there was a strip of paper pasted to the windshield, to which he paid no attention whatever, asking him in red letters not to do so for the first five hundred miles.

Miss Jenny was frankly interested: she must get in and sit in it for a while; and though Simon affected to pay it but the briefest derogatory notice, Isom circled quietly about it with an utter and yearning admiration. But old Bayard just looked down at th long, dusty thing from his chair on the veranda, and grunted.

He would not descend to examine it, even, despite Miss Jenny’s insistence, and he sat with his feet on the rail and watched Bayard slide in under the wheel and drive slowly off with Miss Jenny beside him watched them glide noiselessly down the drive and saw the car pass out of sight down the valley. Presently above thetrees a cloud of dust rose into the azure afternoon and hung rosily in the sun, and a sound as of leashed thunder died muttering behind it, but this had no significance for him. Isom squatted below him on the steps.

It had no significance even when they returned in twenty minutes; he did not even see the car until i had entered the gate and was swooping up the drive and came to a stop almost in its former tracks. Miss Jenny had no hat, and she was holding her hair in both hands, and when the car stopped she sat for a moment so, then she drew a long breath.

“I wish I smoked cigarettes,” she said, and then “Is thatas fast asit’llgo?”

“How fer y’all been, Miss Jenny?” Isom asked, rising and circling the car again with his diffident yearning. Miss Jenny opened the door and got out a little stiffly, but her voice was clear as a girl’s and heeyes were shining and her dry old cheeks were flushed.

“We’ve been to town,” she answered proudly. Town was fourmiles away.

After that the significance grew slowly. He received intimations of it from various sources. But because of his deafness, these intimations came slowlysince they must come directly to him and not through overheard talk. The actual evidence, the convincing evidence, came from old man Falls. Eight or ten times a year he walked in from the county farm, always stopping in at the bank. Twice a year old Bayard bought him a complete outfit of clothing, and on the other occasions he had always for him a present of tobacco and a small sack of peppermint candy, of which the old fellow was inordinately fond.He would never take money.

Old Bayard’s office was also the directors’ room. It was a large room containing a long table aligned with chairs, and a tall cabinet in which blank banking forms were kept, and old Bayard’s roll-top desk and swivel chair, and a sofa on which he napped occasionally in the hot afternoons. His desk, like the one . at home, was cluttered with an astonishing variety of objects which had no relation to the banking business whatever, and the mantel above the fireplace bore yet more objects of an agricultural nature, as well as a dusty assortment of pipes and three or four jars of tobacco which furnished solace for all the banking force and for a respectable portion of the bank’s pipe-smoking clientele. Weather permitting, old Bayard spent most of the day sitting in a tilted chair in the bank door, and when these patrons found him there, they would pass on back to the office and fill their pipes. It was a sort of unspoken convention not to take more than a pipeful at a time.

It was to this room that they would retire on old man Falls’ visits, and here they would sit (they were both deaf) and shout at one another for half an hour or so, about John Sartoris and crops. You could hear them plainly from the street and through the wall of the store on either side. Old man Falls’eyes were blue and innocent as a boy’s and his first act after he and old Bayard were seated, was to open Bayard’s parcel and take from it a plug of chewing tobacco,cut off a chew and put it in his mouthy replace the plug and wrap and tie the parcel neatly again. He never cut the string, but always untied the tedious knot with his stiff, gnarled fingers.

And he sat now in his clean, faded overalls, with the small parcel on his knees, telling Bayard about the automobile that had passed him that morning on the road Everyone had seen or heard of young Bayard’s low gray car, but old man Falls was the first to tell his grandfather how he drove it. Old Bayard sat utterly still, watching the other with his fierce old eyes until he had finished.

“Are you sure who it was?” he asked.

“Hit passed me too fast for me to tell whether they was anybody in hit a-tall or not I asked when I fetched town who ‘twas. Seems like everybody knows how fast he runs hit except you.?

Old Bayard sat quietly for a time. He raised his voice:

“Byron.”

The door opened quietly and the book-keeper,Snopes, entered—a thin, youngish man with hairyhands and covert close eyes that looked always asthough he were just blinking them, though younever saw them closed.

“Yes, sir, Colonel,” he said in a slow, nasal voice without inflection.

“‘Phone out to my house and tell my grandson not to touch that car until I come home.”

“Yes, sir, Colonel” And he was gone as silently as he entered.

Old Bayard slammed around in his swivel chair again and old man Falls leaned forward, peering at his face.

“What’s that ‘ere wen you got on yo’ face, Bayard?” he asked.

“What?” Bayard demanded, then he raised his hand to a small bump which the suffusion of his face had brought into white relief. “Here? I don’t know what it is. It’s been there about a week, but I don’t reckon it’s anything.”

“Isit gittin’ bigger?” the other asked. He rose and laid his parcel down and extended his hand. Old Bayard drew his head away.

“It’s nothing,” he repeated testily. “Let it alone.” But old man Falls put the other’s hand aside and touched the place with his fingers.

“H’m,” he said. “Hard’s a rock Hit’ll git bigger, too. I’ll watch hit, and when hit’s right, I’ll take hit off. Hit ain’t ripe, yit.” The book-keeper appeared suddenly and without noise beside them.

“Yo’ cook says him and Miss Jenny is off car-ridin’ somewheres. I left yo’ message.”

“Jenny’s with him, you say?”

“That’s what yo’ cook says,” the book-keeper repeated in his inflectionless voice.

“Well, allright.”

The book-keeper withdrew and old man Falls picked up his parcel. I’ll be gittin’ on too,” he said. “I’ll come in next week and take a look at hit. you better let hit alone till I git back.” He followed the book-keeper from the room, and presently old Bayard rose and stalked through the lobby and tilted his chair in the door again.

That afternoon when he arrived home, the car was not in sight, nor did his aunt answer his call. He mounted to his room and put on his riding-boots and lit a cigar, but when he looked down from his window into the back yard, neither Isom nor the saddled mare was visible. He tramped down the stairs and on through the house and entered the kitchen, and there Caspey sat, eating and talking to Isom and Elnora.

“And one mo’ time me and another boy—” Caspey was saying. Then Isom saw Bayard, and rose from his seat in the woodbox corner and his eyesrolled whitely in his bullet head. Elnora paused also with her broom, but Caspey turned his head without rising, and still chewing steadily he blinked his eyes at Bayard in the door.

“I sent you word a week ago to come on out here at once, or not to come at all,” Bayard said. “Did you get it?” Caspey mumbled something, still chewing, and old Bayard came into the room, “Get up from there and saddle my horse.”

Caspey turned his back deliberately and raised his glass of buttermilk from the table. “Git on, Caspey,” Elnora hissed at him.

“I ain’t workin’ here,” he answered, just beneath Bayard’s deafness. He turned to Isom. “Whyn’t you go’n git his hoss fer him? Ain’t you workin’ here?”

“Caspey, fer Lawd’s sake!” Elnora implored. “Yes, suh, Cunnel; he’s gwine,” she said loudly.

“Who, me?” Caspey said. “Does I look like it?” He raised the glass steadily to his mouth, then Bayard moved again and Caspey lost his nerve and rose quickly before the other reached him, and crossed the kitchen toward the door,but with sullen insolence in the very shape of his back. As he fumbled with the door Bayard overtook him.

“Are you going to saddle that mare?” he demanded.

“Ain’t gwine skip it, big boy,” Caspey answered, just below Bayard’s deafness.

“What?”

“Oh, Lawd, Caspey!” Elnora moaned. Isom crouched into his corner. Caspey raised his eyesswiftly to Bayard’s face and opened the screen door.

“I says, I ain’t gwine skip it,” he repeated, raising his voice. Simon stood at the foot of the steps, the setter beside him, gaping his toothless mouth up at them, and old Bayard reached a stick of stove wood from the box at his hand and knocked Caspey through the door and down the steps at his father’s feet.

“Now, you go saddle that mare,” he said.

Simon helped his son to rise and led him, a little unsteadily, toward the barn and out of earshot, while the setter watched them, gravely interested. “I kep’ tellin’ you dem new-fangled war notions of yo’n wa’n’t gwine ter work on dis place,” he said angrily. “And you better thank de Lawd fer makin’ yo’ haid hard ez it is. You go’n and git dat mare, en save dat nigger freedom talk fer town-folks: dey mought stomach it. Whut us niggers want ter be free fer, anyhow? Ain’t we got ez many white folks now ez we kin suppo’t?”

That night at supper, old Bayard looked at his grandson across the roast of mutton. “Will Falls told me you passed him on the Poor House hill running forty miles an hour today.”

“Forty fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said promptly, “it was fifty-four. I was watching the—what do you call it, Bayard? speedometer.”

Old Bayard sat with his head bent a little, watching his hands trembling on the carving knife and fork; hearing beneath the napkin tucked into his waistcoat, his heart a little too light and a little too fast; feeling Miss Jenny’s eyes upon him.

“Bayard,” she said sharply. “What’s that on your face?” He rose so suddenly at his place that his chairtipped over backward with a crash, and Ee tramped blindly from the room with his trembling hands and the light swift thudding of his heart.

“I know what you want me to do,” Miss Jenny told old Bayard across her newspaper. “You want me to let my housekeeping go to the dogs and spend all my time in that car, that’s what you want Well, I’m not going to do it I don’t mind riding with him now and then, but I’ve got too much to do with my time to spend it keeping him from raining that car fast Neck, too,” she added. She rattled the paper crisply.

She said: “Besides, you ain’t foolish enough to believe he’ll drive slow just because there’s somebody with him, are you? If you do think so, you’d better send Simon along. Lord knows Simon can spare the time. Since you quit using the carriage, if he does anything at all, I don’t know it” She read the paper again.

Old Bayard’s cigar smoked in his fingers.

“I might send Isom,” he said.

Miss Jenny’s paper rattled sharply and she stared at her nephew for a long moment “God in heaven, man, why don’t you put a block and chain On him and have done with it?”

“Well, didn’t you suggest sending Simon with him, yourself? Simon has his work to do, but all Isom ever does is saddle my horse once a day, and I can do that myself.”

“I was trying to be ironical,” Miss Jenny said. “God knows, I should have learned better by this time. But if you’ve got to invent something new for the niggers to do, you let it be Simon. I need Isom to keep a roof over your head and food on the table.” She rattled the paper. “Why don’t you come right out and tell him not to drive fast? A man that has to spend eight hours a day sitting in a chair in that bank door ought not to have to spend the rest of the afternoon helling around the country in an automobile if he don’t want to.”

“Do you think it would do any good to ask him? There was never a damned one of ‘em ever paid any attention to my wishes yet.”

“Ask the devil,” Miss Jenny said. “Who said anything about ask? Tell him not to. Tell him that if you hear again of his going fast in it, that you’ll frail the life out of him. I believe anyway that you like to ride in that car, only you won’t admit it, and you just don’t want him to ride in it when you can’t go too.” But old Bayard had slammed his feet to the floor and risen, and he tramped heavily from the room.

Instead of mounting the stairs, however, Miss Jenny heard his footsteps the away down the halL and presently she rose and followed to the back porch, where he stood in the darkness there. The night was dark, myriad with drifting odors of the spring and with insects. Dark against lesser dark, the barn loomed upon the sky.

“He hasn’t come yet,” she said impatiently, touching his arm. “I could have told you. Go on up and go to bed, now; don’t you know he’ll let you know when he comes in? You’re going to think him into a ditch somewhere, with these fool notions of yours.” Then more gently: “You’re too childish about that car. It’s no more dangerous at night than it is in daylight. Come on, now.”

He shook her hand off, but he turned obediently and entered the house. This time he mounted the stairs and she could hear him in his bedroom, thumping about. Presently he ceased slamming doors and drawers and lay beneath the reading lamp with his Dumas, and he lay reading quietly. After a time the door opened and young Bayard entered and came into the radius of the light with his bleak eyes.

His grandfather did not remark his presence and he touched old Bayard’s arm. Then old Bayard looked up, and when he did so young Bayard turned and quitted the room.

After the shades on the windows were drawn at three o’clock old Bayard retired to his office to wait until his grandson came for him. In the front of the bank the cashier and the book-keeper could hear him clattering and banging around. The cashier paused, a stack of silver clipped neatly in his fingers.

“Hear ‘im?” he said. “Something on his mind here, lately. Used to be he was quiet as a mouse back, there until they come for him, but last few weeks he tramples and thumps around back there like he was fighting hornets.”

The book-keeper said nothing. The cashier set the stack of silver aside, built up another one.

“Something on his mind, lately. That examiner must a put a bug in his ear, I reckon.”

The book-keeper said nothing. He swung the adding machine to his desk and clicked the lever over. In the back room old Bayard moved audibly about. The cashier stacked the remaining silver neatly and rolled a cigarette. The book-keeper bent above the steady clicking of the adding machine, and the cashier sealed his cigarette and lit it and waddled to the window and lifted the curtain.

“Simon’s brought the carriage, today,” he said

“That boy finally wrecked that car, I reckon. Better call Colonel.”

The book-keeper slid from his stool and went to the door to the office and opened it. Old Bayard glanced up from his desk.

“All right, Byron,” he said. The book-keeper turned away.

Old Bayard stalked through the bank and opened the street door and stopped utterly, the door knob in his hand.

“Where’s Bayard?” he said.

“He ain’t comin’,” Simon answered. Old Bayard crossed the pavement.

“What? Where is he?”

“He en Isom off somewhar in dat cyar,” Simon answered. “Lawd knows whar dey is by now. Takin’ dat boy away fum his work in de middle of de day, cyar-ridin’. After all de time I spent tryin’ to git some sense inter Isom’s haid,” Simon continued. “Cyar-ridin’,” he said. “Cyar-ridin’.” Old Bayard got in the carriage.

“I’ll be damned,” old Bayard said, “if I haven’t got the triflingest set of foils to make a living for in the whole damn world. There’s just one tiling about it: when I finally have to go to the poor house, every damned one of you’ll be there when I come.”

“Now, here you quoilin’ too,” Simon said. “Miss Jenny shoutin’ at me ‘twell I wuz thru de gate, and now you already started at dis end. But ef Mr. Bayard don’t leave dat boy alone, he ain’t gwine to be no better’n a town nigger spite of all I kin do.”

“Jenny’s already ruined him,” old Bayard said. “Bayard can’t hurt him much.”

“You sho’ tole de troof den,” Simon agreed. He gathered up the reins. “Come up, dar.”

“Here, hold up a minute, Simon,” old Bayard said.

Simon reined the horses back! “Whut you want now?”

Old Bayard drew another long breath. “Go back to my office and get me a cigar out of that jar on the mantel.” .

Two days later, as he and Simon tooled sedately homeward through the afternoon, simultaneously almost with the warning thunder of it the car burst upon them on a curve, slewed into the ditch and into the road again and rushed on; and in the flashing instant he and Simon saw the whites of Isom’s eyes and the ivory cropping of his teeth behind the steering wheel. When the car returned home that afternoon Simon conducted Isom to the barn and whipped him with a harness strap.

That night they sat in the office after supper. Old Bayard held his cigar unlighted in his fingers. Miss Jenny was immersed in her paper.

Suddenly old Bayard said: “Maybe he’ll get tired of it after a while.”

Miss Jenny raised her head.

“And when he does,” Miss Jenny said, “don’t you know what he’ll get then? When he finds that car won’t go fast enough fo’ him?” she demanded, staring at him across her newspaper. He sat holding his cigar, his head bent a little. “He’ll buy an aeroplane,” Miss Jenny told him. She rattled the paper and turned a page. “He ought to have a wife,” she added in a detached voice, reading again. “Let him get a son, then he can break his neck as soon and as often as he pleases. Providence doesn’t seem to have any judgment at all,” she said, thinking of the two of them, of his dead brother. She said: “But Lord knows, I’d hate to see any girl I was fond of, married to him.” She rattled the paper again, turning anotherpage. “I don’t know what else you expect from him. From any Sartoris. You don’t waste your afternoons riding in that car because you think it’ll keep him from turning it over: you go because when it does happen, you want to be in it, too. So do you think you’ve got any more consideration for folks than he has?” He sat holding his cigar, his face still averted. Miss Jenny was watching him again across her paper.

“I’m coming down town in the morning, and we’re going and have the doctor look at that bump on your face, you hear?”

In his room, as he removed his collar and tie before the chest of drawers, his eye fell upon the pipe which he had laid there four weeks ago, and he put the collar and tie down and picked up the pipe and held it in his hand, rubbing the charred bowl slowly with his thumb.

Then with sudden decision he quitted the room and tramped down the hall. At the end of the hall a stair mounted into the darkness. At the foot he fumbled a light switch and followed the cramped turnings cautiously in the dark, to a door set at a difficult angle, and opened it upon a broad, low room with a pitched ceiling, smelling of dust and silence and ancient disused things.

The room was cluttered with indiscriminate furniture—chairs and sofas like patient ghosts holding lightly in dry and rigid embrace yet other ghosts—a fitting place for dead Sartorises to gather and speak among themselves of glamorous and old disastrous days. The unshaded light swung on a single cord from the center of the ceiling. He unknotted it and drew it to its full length and carried it across to a nail in the wall above a cedar chest. He fastened it here and drew a chair across to the chest and sat down.

The chest had not been opened since 1901, whenhis son John had succumbed to yellow fever and an old Spanish bullet-wound. There had been two occasions since, in July and in October of last year, but the other grandson still possessed quickness and all the incalculable portent of his heritage. So he had forborne for the time being, expecting to kill two birds with one stone, as it were.

Thus each opening was in a way ceremonial, commemorating the violent finis to some, phase of his family’s history, and while he struggled with the stiff lock it seemed to him that a legion of ghosts breathed quietly at his shoulder, and he pictured a double line of them with their arrogant identical faces waiting just beyond a portal and stretchingaway toward the invisible dais where Something sat waiting the latest arrival among them; thought of them chafing a little and a little bewildered, thought and desire being denied them, in a place where, immortal, there were no opportunities for vainglorious swashbuckling. Denied that Sartoris heaven in which they could spend eternity dying deaths of needless and magnificent violence while spectators doomed to immortality looked eternally on. The Valhalla which John Sartoris, turning the wine glass in his big, well-shaped hand that night at the supper table, had seen in its chaste and fragile bubble.

The lock gave at last and he raised the lid. The ghosts fell away and .from the chest there rose a thin exhilarating odor of cedar, and something else: a scent drily and muskily nostalgic, as of old ashes, and his hands, well-shaped but not so large and a shade less capable than his father’s, rested for a moment upon a brocade garment. The brocade was richly hushed and the fall of fine Mechlin was dustily yellow, pale and textureless as winter sunlight. He raised the garment carefully. The lace cascaded mellow andpale as spilled wine upon his hands, and he laid it aside and lifted out next a rapier. It was a Toledo, a blade delicate and fine as the prolonged stroke of a violin bow, in a velvet sheath. The sheath was elegant and flamboyant and soiled, and the seams had cracked drily.

Old Bayard held the rapier upon his hands for a while, feeling the balance of it. It was just such an implement as a Sartoris would consider the proper equipment for raising tobacco in a virgin wilderness; it and the scarlet heels and the ruffled wristbands in which he fought his stealthy and simple neighbors. And old Bayard held it upon his two hands, seeing in its stained fine blade and shabby elegant sheath the symbol of his race; that too in the tradition: the thing itself fine and clear enough, only the instrument had become a little tarnished in its very aptitude for shaping circumstance to its arrogant ends.

He laid it aside. Next came a heavy cavalry sabre, and a rosewood box containing two dueling pistols with silver mountings and with the lean, deceptive delicacy of race horses, and what old man Falls had called “that ‘ere dang der’nger.” It was a stubby, evil-looking thing with its three barrels; viciously and coldly utilitarian, and between the other two weapons it lay like a cold and deadly insect between two flowers.

He lifted out next the blue army forage-cap of the ‘forties and a small pottery vessel and a Mexican machete, and a long-necked oil can such as locomotive drivers use. It was of silver, and engraved upon it, surrounded by a carven ornate wreath, was the picture of a locomotive with a huge bell-shaped funnel Beneath it, the name, “Virginia” and the date, “August 9, 1874.”

He laid these aside and with sudden purposefulnesshe removed the other objects—a frogged and braided coat of Confederate grey and a gown of sprigged muslin scented faintly of lavender and evocative of old formal minuets and drifting honeysuckle among steady candle flames—and came upon a conglomeration of yellowed papers neatly bound in packets, and at last upon a huge, brass-bound Bible. He raised this to the edge of the chest and opened it. The paper was brown and mellow. with years, and it had a texture like that of slightly-moist wood ashes, as though each page were held intact by Its archaic and fading print lie turned the pages carefully back to the fly leaves. Beginning near the bottom of the final blank page, a column of names and dates rose in stark, fading simplicity, growing fainter and fainter where time had lain upon; them. At the top they were still legible, as they were at the foot of the preceding page. But halfway up this page they ceased, and from there on the sheet was blank save for the faint soft mottlings of time and an occasional brownish penstroke significant but without meaning.

Bayard sat for a long time, regarding the stark dissolving apotheosis of his name. Sartorises had derided Time, but Time was not vindictive, because it was longer than Sartorises. And probably unaware of them. But it was a good gesture, anyway. And he recalled his father’s words.

“In the nineteenth century,” John Sartoris had said, ‘‘chording over genealogy anywhere is poppycock. But particularly so in America, where only what a man takes and keeps has any significance, and where all of lis have a common ancestry and the only house from which we can claim descent with any assurance, is the Old Bailey, Yet the man Who professes to care nothing about his forbears is only a little lessvain than he who bases all his actions on blood precedent. And a Sartoris is entitled to a little vanity and poppycock, if he wants it.”

Yes, it was a good gesture, and Bayard sat and mused quietly on the tense he had unwittingly used. Was. Fatality again: the augury of a man’s destiny peeping out at him from the roadside hedge, if he but recognize it; and as he sat and gazed with blind eyes at the page, Time rolled back again and again he ran panting through undergrowth while a Yankee cavalry patrol crashed behind him, crashed fainter and fainter until he crouched with spent, laboring lungs in a bramble thicket and heard their fading thunder along a dim wagon road. Then he crawled forth again and went to a spring he knew that flowed from the roots of a beech tree; and as he leaned his mouth to it the final light of day was reflected onto his face, bringing into sharp relief forehead and nose above the cavernous sockets of his eyes and the panting animal snarl of his teeth, and from the still water there stared back at him for a sudden moment, a skull.

The unturned corners of man’s destiny. Well, heaven, that crowded place, lay just beyond one of them, they claimed; heaven, filled with every man’s illusion of himself and with the conflicting illusions of him that parade through the minds of other illusions...He stirred again and sighed quietly, and took out his fountain pen. At the bottom of the column he wrote:

“John Sartoris. July 5,1918.”

and beneath that:

“Caroline White Sartoris and son. October 27, 1918.”

When the ink was dry he closed the book and replaced it and took the pipe from his pocket and putit in the rosewood box with the dueling pistols and the derringer and replaced the other things and closed the chest and locked it again.

Young Bayard drove her to town the next morning, Old Bayard sat tilted in his chair in the door, and he looked up at her with a fine assumption of surprise and his deafness seemed more pronounced than ordinary. But she got him out of his chair with cold implacability and led him still grumbling along the street, where merchants and loungers before the stores spoke to her as to a martial queen, old Bayard stalking along beside her, with laggard reluctance, like that of a small boy.

But she carriedhim firmly on, and at a row of dingy signs tackedflatto the wall, she turned and mounted a narrow stairway debouching between two stores. At the top was a dark corridor with doors. The nearest door was of pine, its gray paint scarred at the bottom as though it had been kicked repeatedly by feet that struck it at the same height and with the same force. In the door itself, near the edge, two holes an inch apart bore mute witness to the missing hasp, and from a staple in the jamb depended the hasp itself , fixed there by a huge rusty lock of a pattern which had not been manufactured in twenty years. Bayard offered to stop here, but Miss Jenny led him firmly on to the second door across the hall

This door was freshly painted and grained to represent walnut. Into the top half of it was let a pane of thick, opaque glass bearing a name in raised gilt letters, and two embracing office hours. Miss Jenny opened this door and Bayard followed her into a small cubbyhole of a room of spartan but suave asepsis. The walls were an immaculate new gray, with an engraved reproduction of a Corot and two spidery dry-points in narrow frames, and it contained a new rug in warm buff tones and a bare table and four chairs in fumed oak—all impersonal and clean and inexpensive, but revealing at a glance the proprietor’s soul; a soul hampered now by material strictures, but destined and determined to someday function in its proper surroundings—that of Persian rugs and mahogany or teak, and a single irreproachable print on the chaste wall. A young woman in a starched white dress rose from a smaller table in one corner, patting her hair.

“Good morning, Myrtle,” Miss Jenny said. “Tell Dr. Alford we’d like to see him, please.”

“You have an appointment?” the girl said in a voice without any inflection at all.

“We’ll make one now, then,” Miss Jenny replied. “You don’t mean to say Dr. Alford don’t come to work before ten o’clock, do you?”

“Dr. Alford don’t—doesn’t see anyone without an appointment,” the girl parroted, gazing at a point above their heads. “If you have no appointment, you’ll have to have an ap—”

“Tut, tut,” Miss Jenny interrupted briskly, “you run and tell Dr. Alford that Colonel Sartoris wants to see him, there’s a good girl.”

“Yessum, Miss Jenny,” the girl said obediently and she crossed the room, but at the further door she paused again and again her voice became parrot-like. “Won’t you sit down? I’ll see if the doctor is engaged.”

“You go and tell Dr. Alford we’re here,” Miss Jenny repeated affably. “Tell him I’ve got some shopping to do this morning.”

“Yessum, Miss Jenny,” the girl agreed, and disappeared, and after a dignified interval she returned, once more clothed faultlessly in her professional manner. The doctor will see you now. Come in, please,” she said, holding the door open and standing aside.

. “Thank you, honey,” Miss Jenny replied. “Is your mamma still in bed?”

“No’m, she’s sitting up now, thank you.”

“That’s good,” Miss Jenny agreed. “Come on, Bayard.”

This room was smaller than the other, and brutally carbolized, There was a white enameled cabinet filled with vicious nickel gleams, and a metal operating table and an array of electric furnaces and ovens and sterilizers. When they entered, the doctor in a linen jacket bent above a small desk, and for a while he proffered them his sleek oblivious profile. Thenhe glanced up, and rose.

He was in the youthful indeterminate thirties; a newcomer to the town and nephew of an old resident. He had made a fine record in medical school and was of a personable exterior, but there was a sort of preoccupied dignity, a sort of erudite and cold un-illusion regarding mankind, about him that precluded the easy intimacy of the small town and caused even those who remembered his visits during his boyhood to his aunt and uncle, to address him. as doctor or mister. He had a small moustache and a face like a reposeful mask—a comforting face, but cold; and while Bayard sat restively his dry scrubbed fingers probed delicately at the wen on the other’s face. Miss Jenny asked him a question, but he continued his delicate exploration raptly, as though he had not heard, as though she had not even spoken; inserting a small electric bulb, which he first sterilized, into Bayard’s mouth and snapping its ruby glow on and off withinhis cheek. Then he removed it and sterilized it again and returned it to the cabinet.

“Well?” Miss Jenny said impatiently. The doctor shut the cabinet deliberately and dried his hands and came and stood over them, and with his thumbs hooked in his jacket pockets he became solemnly and unctuously technical, rolling the harsh words from his tongue with an epicurean deliberation.

“It should be taken out at once,” he finished. “It doesn’t pain him now, and that is the reason I advise an immediate operation.”

“You mean, it might develop into cancer?” Miss Jenny asked.

“No question about it at all. Course of time. Neglect it, and I can promise you nothing; have it out now, and he need never worry about it.” He looked at Bayard again with lingering and chill contemplation. “It will be very simple. I will remove it as easily as that.” And he made a short gesture with his hand.

“What’s that?” Bayard demanded.

“I say, I can remove that growth so easily you won’t know it, Colonel Sartoris.”

“I’ll be damned if you do!” Bayard rose with one of his characteristic plunging movements.

“Sit down, Bayard,” Miss Jenny ordered. “Nobody’s going to cut on you without your knowing it. Should it be done right away?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am. I wouldn’t have that thing on my face overnight. Otherwise, it is only fair to warn you that I cannot assume responsibility for it...I could remove it in two minutes,” he added, looking at Bayard’s face again with cold speculation. Then he half turned his head and stopped in a listening attitude, and beyond the thin walls a voice in the other room boomed in rich rolling waves.

“Mawnin’, sister,” it said. “Didn’t I hear BayardSartoris cussin’ in here?” The doctor and Miss Jenny held their arrested attitudes, then the door surged open and the fattest man in Yocona county filled it. He wore a shiny alpaca coat over waistcoat and trousers of baggy impressed black broadcloth; above a plaited shirt the fatty rolls of his neck practically hid his low collar and a black string tie. His Roman senator’s head was covered with a vigorous curling of silvery hair. What the devil’s the matter with you?” he boomed, then: he sidled into the room, filling it completely, dwarfing its occupants and its furnishings.

This was Doctor Lucius Quintus Peabody, eighty-seven year? old and weighing three hundred and ten pounds and possessing a digestive tract like that of a horse. He had practiced medicine in Yocona county when a doctor’s equipment consisted of a saw and a gallon of whisky and a satchel of calomel; he had been John Sartoris’ regimental surgeon, and up to the day of the automobile he would start out at any hour of the twenty-four in any weather and for any distance, over practically impassable roads in a lopsided buckboard to visit anyone, white or black, who sent for him; accepting for fee usually a meal of corn pone and coffee or perhaps a small measure of corn or fruit, or a few flower bulbs or graftings. When he was young and hasty he had kept a daybook, kept it meticulously until these hypothetical assets totaled $10,000.00. But that was forty years ago, and since then he hadn’t bothered with a record at all; and now from time to time a countryman enters his shabby office and discharges an obligation, commemorating sometimes the payor’s entry into the world, incurred by his father or grandfather an4 which Dr. Peabody himself had long since forgotten about. Everyone in the county knew him, and it wassaid that he could spend the balance of his days driving about the county in the backboard he still used, with never a thought for board and lodging and without the expenditure of a penny for either. He filled the room with his bluff and homely humanity, and as he crossed the floor .and patted Miss Jenny’s back with one flail-like hand the whole building trembled to his tread.

“Mawnin’, Jenny,” he said. “Havin’ Bayard measured for insurance?”

“This damn butcher wants to cut on me,” Bayard said querulously. “You come on and make ‘em let me alone, Loosh.”

“Ten A.M.’s mighty early in the day to start car-vin’ white folks,”Dr. Peabody boomed. “Nigger’s different. Chop up a nigger any time after midnight What’s the matter with him, son?” he asked of Dr. Alford.

‘1 don’t believe it’s anything but a wart,” Miss Jenny said, “but I’m tired of looking at it.”

“It’s no wart,”Dr. Alford corrected stiffly. He recapitulated his diagnosis in technical terms while Dr. Peabody enveloped them all in the, rubicund benevolence of his presence.

“Sounds pretty bad, don’t it?” he agreed, and he shook the floor again and pushed Bayard firmly into the chair again with one huge hand, and with the other he dragged his face up to the light. Then he dug a pair of iron-bowed spectacles from the side pocket of his coat and examined Bayard’s wen through them. “Think it ought to come off, do you?”

“I do,”Dr. Alford answered coldly. “I think it is imperative that it be removed. Unnecessary there. Cancer.”

“Folks got along with cancer a long time beforethey invented knives,”Dr. Peabody said drily. “Hold still, Bayard.”

And people like you are one of the reasons, was on the tip of the younger man’s tongue. But he forbore and said instead: “I can remove that growth in two minutes, Colonel Sartoris.”

“Damned if you do,” Bayard rejoined violently, trying to rise. “Get away, Loosh.”

“Sit still,”Dr. Peabody said equably, holding him down while he probed at the wen. “Does it hurt any?”

“No. I never said it did. And I’ll be damned—”

“You’ll probably be damned anyway,”Dr. Peabody told him. “You’d be about as well off dead, anyhow. I don’t know anybody that gets less fun out of living than you seem to.”

“You told the truth for once,” Miss Jenny agreed. “He’s the oldest person I ever knew in my life.”

“And so,”Dr. Peabody continued blandly, “I wouldn’t.worry about it. Let it stay there. Nobody cares what your face looks like. If you were a young fellow, now, out sparkin’ the gals every night—”

“If Dr. Peabody is permitted to interfere with impunity—” the younger man began.

‘Will Falls says he can cure it,” Bayard said.

“With that salve of his?”Dr. Peabody asked.

“Salve?”Dr. Alford repeated. “Colonel Sartoris, if you let any quack that comes along treat that growth with homemade or patent remedies, you’ll be dead in six months. Dr. Peabody even will bear me out,” he added with fine irony.

“I don’t know,”Dr. Peabody replied slowly. “Will has done some curious things with that salve of his.”

“I must protest against this,”Dr. Alford said. “Mrs. Du Pre, I protest against a member of my profession sanctioning even negatively such a practice.”

“Pshaw, boy,”Dr. Peabody answered. “We ain’t goin’ to let Will put his dope on Bayard’s wart. It’s all right for niggers and livestock, but Bayard don’t need it. We’ll just let this thing alone, long as it don’t hurt him.”

“If that growth is not removed immediately, I wash my hands of all responsibility,”Dr. Alford stated. “To neglect it will be as fatal as Mr. Falls’ salve. Mrs. Du Pre, I ask you to witness that this consultation has taken this unethical turn through no fault of mine and over my protest.”

“Pshaw, boy,”Dr. Peabody said again. “This ain’t hardly worth the trouble of cuttin’ out. We’ll save you an arm or a leg as soon as that fool grandson of his turns that automobile over with ‘em. Come on, Bayard.”

“Mrs. Du Pre—”Dr. Alford essayed.

“Bayard can come back, if he wants to.”Dr. Peabody patted the younger man’s shoulder with his heavy hand. “I’m going to take him to my office and talk to him a while. Jenny can bring him back if she wants to. Come on, Bayard.” And he led Bayard from the room. Miss Jenny rose also.

“That Loosh Peabody is as big a fogy as old Will Falls,” she said. “Old people just fret me to death. You wait: I’ll bring him right back here, and we’ll finish this business.”Dr. Alford held the door open for her and she sailed in a stiff silk-clad rage from the room and followed her nephew and Dr. Peabody across the corridor and through the scarred door with its rusty lock, and into a room resembling a miniature cyclonic devastation mellowed peacefully over with dust ancient and long undisturbed.

“You, Loosh Peabody,” Miss Jenny said.

“Sit down, Jenny,”Dr. Peabody told her, “and be quiet. Unfasten your shirt, Bayard.”

“What?” Bayard said belligerently. The other thrust him into a chair.

‘Want to see your chest,” he explained. He crossed to an ancient roll-top desk and rummaged through the dusty litter which it bore. There was litter and dust everywhere in the huge room. Its four windows gave, upon the square, but the elms and mulberry trees ranged along the sides of the square shaded these first-floor offices, so that light entered them but it was tempered, like light which has passed through water. In the corners of the ceiling were spider webs thick and heavy as Spanish moss and dingy as gray lace; and the once-white walls were an even and unemphatic drab save for a paler rectangle here and there where an outdated calendar had hung and been removed. Besides the desk the room contained three or four huge chairs with broken springs, and a rusty stove in a sawdust-filled box, and a leather sofa holding mutely in its worn surface Dr. Peabody’s recumbent shape; beside it arid slowly gathering successive lasers of dust, was a stack of lurid paper-covered nickel novels. This was Dr. Peabody’s library, and on this sofa he passed his office hours, reading them over and over. Other books there were none,

But the waste basket beside the desk and the desk itself and the mantel above the trash-filled fireplace, and the window ledges too were cluttered with circular mail matter and mail-order catalogues and government bulletins of all kinds. In one corner, on an upended packing-box, sat a water cooler of stained oxidized glass; in another corner leaned a clump of cane fishing poles warping slowly of their own weight; and on every horizontal surface rested a collection of objects not to be found outside of a second-hand store—old garments, bottles, a kerosenelamp, a wooden box of tins of axle grease, lacking one, a clock in the shape of a bland china morning-glory supported by four garlanded maidens who had suffered sundry astonishing anatomical mischances, and here and there among their dusty indiscrimination various instruments pertaining to the occupant’s profession. It was one of these that Dr. Peabody sought now, in the littered desk on which sat a framed photograph of his son, and though Miss Jenny said again, “You, Loosh Peabody, you listen to me,” he continued to seek it with undisturbed equanimity.

“You fasten your clothes and we’ll go back to that doctor,” Miss Jenny said to her nephew. “Neither you nor I can waste any more time with a doddering old fool.”

“Sit down, Jenny,”Dr. Peabody repeated, and he drew out a drawer and removed from it a box of cigars and a handful of faded artificial trout flies and a soiled collar and lastly a stethoscope, then he tumbled the other things back into the drawer and shut it with his knee.

Miss Jenny sat trim and outraged, fuming while he listened to Bayard’s heart.

“Well,” she snapped, “does it tell you how to take that wart off his face? Will Falls didn’t need any telephone to find that out.”

“It tells more than that,”Dr. Peabody answered. “It tells how Bayard’ll get rid of all his troubles, if he keeps on riding in that hellion’s automobile.”

“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said. “Bayard’s a good driver. I never rode with a better one.”

“It’ll take more’n a good driver to keep this”—he tapped Bayard’s chest with his blunt finger—“goin’, time that boy whirls that tiling around another curve or two like I’ve seen him do.”

“Did you ever hear of a Sartoris dying from a natural cause, like anybody else?” Miss Jenny demanded. “Don’t you know that heart ain’t going to take Bayard off before his time? You get up from there, and come on with me,” she added to her nephew. Bayard buttoned his shirt, and Dr. Peabody sat onthe sofa and watched him quietly.

“Bayard,” he said suddenly, “why don’t you stay out of that damn thing?”

“What?”

“If you don’t keep out of that car, you ain’t goin’ to need me nor Will Falls, nor that boy in yonder with all his hand-boiled saws and razors, neither.”

“What business is it of yours?” Bayard demanded. “By God, can’t I break my neck in peace if I want to?” He rose. He was trembling again, fumbling at his waistcoat buttons, and Miss Jenny rose also and made to button it for him, but he put her roughly aside. Dr. Peabody sat quietly, thumping his fat fingers on one fat knee. “I have already outlived my time,” Bayard continued more mildly. “I am the first Sartoris there is any record of, who saw sixty years. I reckon Old Marster is keeping me for a reliable witness to the extinction of my race.”

“Now,” Miss Jenny said icily, “you’ve made your speech, and Loosh Peabody has wasted the morning for you, so I reckon we can leave now and let Loosh go out and doctor mules for a while, and you can sit around the rest of the day, being a Sartoris and feeling sorry for yourself. Good morning, Loosh.”

“Make him let that place alone, Jenny,”Dr. Peabody said.

“Ain’t you and Will Falls going to cure it for him?”

“You keep him from letting Will Falls put anything on it,”Dr. Peabody repeated equably. “It’s all right. Just let it alone.”

“We’re going to a doctor, that’s what we’re going to do,” Miss Jenny replied. “Come on here.”

When the door had closed he sat motionless and heard them quarrelling beyond it. Then the sound of their voices moved down the corridor toward the stairs, and still quarrelling loudly and on Bayard’s part with profane emphasis, the voices died away. Then Dr. Peabody lay back on the sofa shaped already to the bulk of him, and with random deliberation he reached a nickel thriller from the stack at the head of the couch.

4

As they neared the bank Narcissa Benbow came along from the opposite direction, and they met at the door. Old Bayard liked her, liked to rally her in a ponderously gallant way on imaginary affairs of the heart, and she had for him a diffident sort of affection and she stopped in her pale print dress and shouted her grave voice into his deafness, and when he took his tilted chair again Miss Jenny followed her into the bank and to the window. There was no one behind the grille at the moment save the book-keeper. He glanced briefly and covertly over his shoulder at them, then slid from his stool and crossed to the window with his surreptitious tread but without raising his eyes again.

He took Narcissa’s check, and while she listened to Miss Jenny’s recapitulation of Bayard’s and Loosh Peabody’s stubborn masculine stupidity, she remarked beneath the brim of her hat his forearms, from which the sleeves had been turned back, and the fine, reddish hair which clothed them down to the second joints of his fingers; and while Miss Jennyceased momentarily to nurse her sense of helpless outrage, she remarked with a faint distinct distaste and a little curiosity, since it was not particularly warm today, the fact that his arms and hands were beaded with perspiration.

But this was not long in her consciousness, and she took the notes he pushed under the grille to her and opened her bag. From its blue satin maw the corner of an envelope and some of its superscription .peeped suddenly, but she crumpled it quickly from sight and put the money in and closed the bag before Miss Jenny had seen. They turned away. At the door she paused again, clothed in her still and untarnished aura, and stood for a moment while old Bayard made her a heavy and involved compliment upon her appearance. Then she went on, surrounded by her grave tranquility like a visible presence or an odor or a sound.

As long as she was in sight at the door, the bookkeeper stood where she had left him. His head was bent and his hand made a series of neat, meaningless figures on the pad beneath it, until she moved again and went on out of sight. Then he moved, and in doing so he found that the pad had adhered to his sweating wrist, so that when he removed his arm it came away also, then its own weight freed it and it dropped to the floor.

He finished the forenoon stooped on his high stool at his high desk beneath the green-shaded light, penning his neat figures into ledgers and writing words into them in the flowing Spencerian hand he had been taught in a Memphis business college. At times he slid from the stool and crossed to the window with his covert evasive eyes and served a client, then returned to his stool and picked up his pen. The cashier, a rotund man with bristling hair and lappingjowls like a Berkshire hog, returned presently, accompanied by a director, who followed him inside the grille. They ordered Coca-Colas from a neighboring drug store by telephone and stood talking until the refreshment arrived by negro boy. Snopes had been included and he descended again and took his glass. The other two sipped theirs; he spooned the ice from his into a spittoon and emptied it at a draught and replaced the glass on the tray and spoke a general and ignored thanks in his sober country idiom and returned to his desk.

Noon came. Old Bayard rose crashing from his tilted chair and stalked back to his office, where he would eat his frugal cold lunch and then sleep for an hour, and banged the door behind him. The cashier took his hat and departed also: for an hour Snopes would have the bank to himself. Outside the square lay motionless beneath noon; the dinnerward exodus of lawyers and merchants and clerks did not disturb its atmosphere of abiding and timeless fixation; in the elms surrounding the courthouse no leaf stirred in the May sunlight. Across the bank windows an occasional shadow passed, but none turned into the door, and presently the square was motionless as a theatre drop.

Snopes drew a sheet of paper from a drawer and laid it beneath the light and wrote slowly upon it, pausing at intervals, drawing his pen through a sentence or a word, writing again. Someone entered; without looking up he slid the paper beneath a ledger, crossed to the window and served the customer, returned and wrote again. The clock on the wall ticked into the silence and into the slow, mouse-like scratching of the pen. The pen ceased at last, but the clock ticked on like a measured dropping of small shot.

He re-read the firstdraught, slowly. Then he drew out a second sheet and made a careful copy. When this was done he re-read it also, comparing the two; then he folded the copy again until it was a small square thickness, and stowed it awayin the fob-pocket of his trousers. The original he carried across to the cuspidor, and holding it above the receptacle he struck a match to it and held it in his fingers until the final moment. Then he dropped it into the spittoon and when it was completely consumed, he crushed the charred thing to powder. Quarter to one. He returned to his stool and opened his ledgers again.

At one the cashier with a toothpick appeared at the door talking to someone, then he entered and went to old Bayard’s office and opened the door. “One o’clock, Colonel,” he shouted into the room, and old Bayard’s heels thumped heavily on the floor. As the Snopes took his hat and emerged from the grille old Bayard stalked forth again and tramped on ahead and took the tilted chair in the doorway.

There is in Jefferson a boarding house known as the Beard hotel It is a rectangular frame building with a double veranda, just off the square, and it is conducted theoretically by a countryman, but in reality by his wife. Beard is a mild, bleached man of indeterminate age and of less than medium size, dressed always in a collarless shirt and a black evil pipe. He also owns the grist mill near the square, and he may be found either at the mill, or on the outskirts of the checker-game in the courthouse yard, or sitting in his stocking feet on the veranda of hishostelry, He is supposed to suffer from some obscure ailment puzzling to physicians, which prevents, him exerting himself physically. His wife is a woman in a soiledapron, with straggling, damp grayish hair and an air of spent but indomitable capability. They have one son, a pale, quiet boy of twelve or so, who is always on the monthly honor roll at school; he may be seen on spring mornings schoolward bound with a bouquet of flowers. His rating among his contemporaries is not high.