Flags in the Dust

Men only patronize the Beard hotel. Itinerant horse- and cattle-traders; countrymen in town overnight during court or the holiday season or arrested perhaps by inclement weather, stop there; and juries during court week—twelve good men and true marching in or out in column of twos, or aligned in chairs and spitting across the veranda rail with solemn and awesome decorum; and two of the town young bloods keep a room there, in which it is rumored dice and cards progress Sundays and drinking is done. But no women. If a skirt (other than Mrs. Beard’s gray apron) so much as flashes in the vicinity of its celibate portals, the city fathers investigate immediately, and woe to the peripatetic Semiramis if she be run to earth. Here, in company with a number of other bachelors—clerks, mechanics and such— the book-keeper Snopes lives.

And here he repaired when the bank day was finished. The afternoon was a replica of the morning. Then at three o’clock the green shades were drawn upon door and windows, and Snopes and the cashier went about striking a daily balance. At 3:30 young Bayard arrived in his car and old Bayard stalked forth and got in it and was driven away. Presently thereafter the janitor, an ancient, practically incapacitated negro called Doctor Jones, came in and doddered futilely with a broom. By 4:30 he was done, and the cashier locked the vault and switchedon the light above it, and he and the book-keeper emerged and locked the front door, and the cashier shook it experimentally.

Snopes crossed the square and passed through the courthouse and entered a street It was a tawdry street; lined with shabby and odorous stores. Into one of these he turned. This was a restaurant, a concrete-floored space bounded by a wooden counter polished by eating elbows and lined with a row of backless and excruciating stools, It was owned and operated by a cousin Snopes, and here he purchased fifteen cents’worth of gaudy stale candy.

He recrossed the square and entered the Beard hotel. The hall was empty; it smelled of damp, harsh soap, and its linoleum floor covering gleamed, still wet From the rear came the unmistakable sounds of Mrs. Beard’s ceaseless and savage activity, and he followed these sounds and she ceased mopping and looked across her gray shoulder at him, sweeping her lank hair aside with a reddened forearm.

“Evening Miz Beard,” he said. “Virgil come home yet?’’

“He was through here a minute ago,” she answered. “If he ain’t out front, I reckon he ain’t fur. You got some mo’ work ferhim?”‘

“Yessum. You don’t know which-a-way he went?”

“Call him in the back yard. He don’t usually go fur away;” She dragged her dank hair aside again; shaped long to labor, her muscles were restive under inaction. She grasped the mop again.

He thanked her and went on, and stood on the kitchen steps above a yard barren of grass and containing a chicken pen also grassless, in which a few fowls huddled or moved about in forlorn distraction in the dust. On one hand was a small kitchen gardenin orderly, tended rows. In the corner of the fence was an outhouse of some sort, of weathered boards.

“Virgil,” he called. The yard was desolate with ghosts; ghosts of discouraged weeds, of food in the shape of tin cans, broken boxes and barrels, a pile of stove wood and a chopping block across which lay an axe whose helve had been mended with rusty wire amateurishly wound. Presently he descended into it, and the chickens remarked him and raised a discordant clamor, anticipating food, doubtless.

“Virgil.”

Sparrows found sustenance of some sort in the dust among the fowls, but the fowls, perhaps with a foreknowledge of doom, huddled back and forth along the wire, discordant and distracted, watching him with predatory importunate eyes. He was about to turn and reenter the kitchen when the boy appeared silently and innocently from the outhouse, with his straw-colored hair and his bland eyes. His mouth was pale and almost sweet, but secretive at the corners. His chin was negligible.

“Hi, Mr. Snopes, you calling me?”

“Yes, if you ain’t doin’ anything special,” Snopes answered, and they reentered the house and passed the room where the boy’s mother labored with drab fury, and mounted a stairs carpeted too with linoleum fastened to each step by a treacherous sheet-iron strip treated to resemble brass and scuffed and scarred by tired or careless feet. Snopes’ room contained a bed, a chair, a dressing table and a wash-stand with a slop-jar beside it. The floor was covered with straw matting frayed in places. The single light hung unshaded from a greenish-brown cord; upon the wall above the paper-filled fireplace a framed lithograph of an Indian maiden in immaculate buckskin leaned her naked bosom above a formal moonlit pool of Italian marble. She held a guitar and a rose, and dusty sparrows sat on the window ledge and watched them brightly through the dusty screen.

The boy entered politely; nevertheless his pale eyes took in the room and its contents at a comprehensive glance. He said: “That air gun ain’t come yet, has it, Mr. Snopes?”

“No, it ain’t,” Snopes answered. “It’ll be here soon, though.”

“You ordered off after it a long time, now.”

“That’s right. But it’ll be here soon. Maybe they haven’t got one in stock, right now.” He crossed to the dresser and took from a drawer a few sheets of foolscap and laid them on the dresser top, and drew the chair up and dragged his suitcase from beneath the bed and set it in the chair. Then he took a fountain pen from his pocket and uncapped it and laid it beside the paper. “It ought to be here any day, now.”

The boy seated himself on the suitcase and took up the pen. “They got ‘em at Watts’ hardware store,” he suggested.

“If the one we ordered don’t come soon, we’ll git one there” Snopes said. “When did we order it anyway?”

“Week ago Tuesday,” the boy answered glibly “I wrote it down.”

“Well, it’llbe here soon. You ready?”

The boy squared himself before the paper. “Yes, sir “Snopes took a folded paper from the top pocket of his trousers and spread it open.

“Code number forty-eight. Mister Joe Butler, Saint Louis, Missouri,” he read, then he leaned over the boy’s shoulder, watching the pen. “That’s right: up close to the top,” he commended. “Now.” The boy dropped down the page about two inches, and asSnopes read, he transcribed in his neat, copybook hand, pausing only occasionally to inquire as to the spelling of a word.

“’I thought once I would try to forget you. But I cannot forget you because you cannot forget me. I saw my letter in your hand satchel today. Every day I can put my hand out and touch you you do not know it. Just to see you walk down the street To know what I know what you know. Some day we will both know together when you got use to it. You kept my letter but you do not answer. That is a good sign you do—” The boy had reached the foot of the page. Snopes removed it, leaving the next sheet ready. He continued to read in his droning, inflectionless voice:

“ —not forget me you would not keep it. I think of you at night the way you walk down the street like I was dirt. I can tell you something you will be surprised I know more than watch you walk down the street with cloths. I will someday, you will not be surprised then. You pass me, you do not know it, I know it. You will know it someday. Because I will tell you.’ Now,” he said, and the boy dropped on to the foot of the page. “‘Yours truly Hal Wagner. Code number twenty-four.’” Again he looked over the boy’s shoulder. “That’s right.” He blotted the final sheet and gathered it up also. The boy recapped the pen and thrust the chair back, and Snopes produced a small paper bag from his coat.

The boy took it soberly. “Much obliged, Mr. Snopes,” he said. He opened it and squinted into it. “It’s funny that air gun don’t come on.”

“It sure is,” Snopes agreed. “I don’t know why it don’t come.”

“Maybe it got lost in the post office,” the boy suggested.

‘It may have. I reckon that’s about what happened to it. I’ll write ‘em again, tomorrow.”

The boy rose, but he stood yet with his straw-colored hair and his bland, innocent face. He took a piece of candy from the sack and ate it without enthusiasm. “I reckon I better tell papa to go to the post office and ask ‘em if it got lost.”

“No, I wouldn’t do that,” Snopes said quickly. “You wait; I’ll tend to it. We’ll get it, all right.”

“Papa wouldn’t mind. He could go over there soon’s he comes home and see about it,. I could find him right now, and ask him to do it, I bet.”

“He couldn’t do no good,” Snopes answered. “You leave it to me. I’ll get that gun, all right”

“I could tell him I been working for you,” the boy pursued. “I remember them letters.”

“No, no, you wait and let me ‘tend to it. I’ll see about it first thing tomorrow.”

“All right, Mr. Snopes.” He ate another piece of candy, without enthusiasm. He moved toward the door. “I remember ever’ one of them letters. I bet I could sit down and write ‘em all again. I bet I could. Say, Mr. Snopes, who is Hal Wagner? Does he live in Jefferson?”

“No, no. You never seen him. He don’t hardly never come to town. That’s the reason I’m ‘tending to his business for him. I’ll see about that air gun, all right.”

The boy opened the door, then he paused again. “They got ‘em at Watts’ hardware store. Good ones. I’d sure like to have one of ‘em. Yes, sir, I sure would.”

“Sure, sure,” Snopes repeated. “Our’n’ll be here tomorrow. You just wait: I’ll see you git that gun.”

The boy departed. Snopes locked the door, and for a while he stood beside it with his head bent, hishands slowly-knotting and writhing together. Then he burned the folded sheet over his hearth and ground the carbonized paper to dust under his heel With his knife he cut the fictitious address from the top of the first sheet, the signature from the bottom of the second, then he folded them and inserted them in a cheap envelope. He sealed this and stamped it, and took out his pen and with his left hand he addressed it with labored printed letters. That night he took it to the station and mailed it on the train. In the meantime he stopped in at Watts’ and bought an air rifle.

5

At times, as Simon puttered about the place during the day, he could look out across the lot into the pasture and see the carriage horses growing daily shabbier and less prideful with idleness and the cessation of their once daily grooming, or he would pass the carriage motionless in its shed, its tongue propped at an accusing angle on the wooden mechanism he had invented for that purpose, and in the harness room the duster and tophat gathered slow dust on the nail in the wall, holding too in their mute waiting a patient and questioning uncomplaint. And at times when he stood shabby and stooped a little with stubborn bewilderment and age on the veranda with its ancient roses and wisteria and all its unchangeable and steadfast serenity and watched Sartorises come and go in a machine a gentleman of his day would have scorned and which any pauper could own and only a fool would ride in, it seemed to him that John Sartoris stood beside him with his bearded, hawklike face and an expression of haughty and fine contempt

And standing so, with the afternoon slanting athwart the southern end of the porch and the heady and myriad odors of the ripening spring and the drowsy hum of insects and the singing of birds steady upon it, Isom rolling his eyes in the dark, cool doorway or near the corner of the house would hear his grandfather mumbling in a monotonous singsong in which was incomprehension and the petulant querulousness of age, and Isom would withdraw to the kitchen where his mother labored steadily with her placid yellow face and her endless crooning song.

“Pappy out dar talkin’ ter Marse John agin,” Isom told her. “Gimme dem cole ‘taters, mammy.”

“Ain’t Miss Jenny got some work fer you dis evenin’?” Elnora demanded, pausing to give him the cold potatoes. “No’m. She gone off in de cyar agin.”

“Hit’s de Lawd’s blessin’ you and her ain’t bofe out in it, like you iswhenever Mist’ Bayard’ll let you. You git on outen my kitchen, now. I got dis flo’ mopped and I don’t want it tracked up.”

Quite often these days Isom could hear his grandfather talking to John Sartoris as he labored about the stable or the flower beds or the lawn. mumbling away to that arrogant ghost which dominated the house and its occupants and the whole scene itself across which the railroad he had built ran punily with distance but distinct, as though it were a stage set for the diversion of him whose stubborn dream, flouting him so deviously and cunningly while the dream was impure, had shaped itself fine and clear now that the dreamer was purged of the grossness of pride with that of flesh.

“Gent’mun equipage,” Simon mumbled. He was working again with his hoe in the salvia bed at thetop of the drive. “Ridin’ in,.dat thing, wid a gent’mun’s proper equipage goin’ to rack and ruin in de barn.” He wasn’t thinking of Miss Jenny. It didn’t make much difference what women rode in, their menfolks permitting of course. They only showed off a gentleman’s equipage anyhow; they were but tie barometers of a gentleman’s establishment, the glass of his gentility: horses themselves knew that “Yo’ own son, yo’ own twin grandson ridin’ right up in yo’ face in a contraption like dat,” he continued, “and you lettin’‘um do it. You bad as dey is. You jes’ got ter lay down de law ter ‘um, Marse John; wid all dese foreign wars and sichde young folks is growed away fum de correck behavior; dey don’t know how ter conduck deyselfs in de gent’mun way. Whut you reckon folks gwine think when dey sees yo’ own folks ridin’ in de same kine o’ rig trash rides in? you jes’ got ter resert you’self, Marse John. Ain’t Sartorises set de quality in dis country since you wuz bawn? And now jes’ look at ‘um.”

He leaned on his hoe and watched the car swing up the drive and stop before the house. Miss Jenny and young Bayard got out and mounted to the veranda. The engine was still running, a faint shimmer of exhaust drifted upon the bright forenoon. Simon came up with his hoe and peered at the array of dials and knobs on the dash. Bayard turned in the door and spoke his name.

“Cut the switch off,” he ordered.

“Cut de which whut off?” Simon asked.

“That little bright-colored lever by the steering wheel there. Turn it down.”

“Naw, suh,” Simon answered, backing away. “I ain’t gwine tech it. I ain’t gwine have it blowin’ up in my face.”

“It won’t hurt you,” Bayard said impatiently. “Just put your hand on it and pull it down. That little bright jigger there.”

Simon peered doubtfully at the gadgets and things, but without coming any nearer, then he craned his neck further and stared over into the car. “I don’t see nothin’ but dis here big lever stickin’ up thoo de flo’. Dat ain’t de one you mentionin’,is it?” Bayard descended in two strides and leaned across the door and cut the switch under Simon’s curious blinking regard. The purr of the engine ceased.

“Well, now,” Simon said. “Is dat de one you wuz takin’ erbout?” He stared at the switch for a time, then he straightened up and stared at the hood. “She’s quit b’ilin’ under dar, ain’t she? Is dat de way you stops her?” But Bayard had mounted the steps again and entered the house. Simon lingered a while longer, examining the gleaming long thing, dynamic as a motionless locomotive and a little awesome, touching it lightly with his hand, then rubbing his hand on his thigh. He walked all around it, slowly, and touched the tires, mumbling to himself and shaking his head, then he returned to his salvia bed, where Bayard emerged presently and found him.

“Want to take a ride, Simon?” he asked.

Simon’s hoe ceased and he straightened up. “Who, me?”

“Sure. Come on.” Simon stood with his static hoe and rubbed his head slowly. Bayard continued to cajole him. “Come on, we’ll just go down the road a piece. It won’t hurt you.”

“Naw, suh, I don’t reckon if ‘s gwine ter hurt me,” he agreed But he allowed himself to be drawn gradually toward the car, staring at its various members with slow blinking speculation, now that it was about to become an actual quantity in his life. At the doorand with one foot raised to the running board he made a final stand against the subtle powers of evil judgment. “You ain’t gwine run it thoo de bushes like you and Isom done dat day y’all passed Cunnel and me on de road, is you?”

Bayard reassured him, and he got in slowly, with mumbled sounds of anticipatory concern, and he sat forward on the seat with his feet drawn under him, clutching the door with one hand and a lump of shirt on his chest with the other as the car moved down the drive. They passed through the gates and onto the road and still he sat hunched forward on the seat, as the car gained speed, and with a sudden convulsive movement he caught his hat just as it blew off his head.

“I ‘speck dis is fur ernough, ain’t it?” he suggested, raising his voice. He putted his hat down on his head, but as he released it he had to clutch wildly at it again, and he removed it and clasped it beneath his aim, and again his hand fumbled at his breast and became motionless clamped tightly about a lump of his shirt. “I got to weed dat bed dis mawnin’,” he said, louder stUL “Please, suh, Mist? Bayard,” lie added and his wizened old body sat yet further forward on the seat and he cast quick covert glances at the steadily increasing rush of hedgerow beside the road.

Then Bayard leaned forward and Simon watched his forearm tauten, and then they shot forward on a roar of sound like blurred thunderous wings. Earth, the unbelievable ribbon of the road, crashed beneath them and away behind into dust convolvulae: a dim moiling nausea of speed, and the roadside greenery was a tunnel rigid and streaming and unbroken. But he said no other word, and when Bayard glanced the lipless cruel derision of his teeth at him presently, Simon knelt in the floor, his old disreputable hattinder his arm and his hand clutching a fold of his shirt on Ins; breast Later the white man glanced at him again, and Simon was watching him and the blurred irises of his eyes were no longer a melting pupilless brown: they were red, and in the blast of wind they were unwinking and in them was that mindless phosphorescence of an animal’s. Bayard jammed the throttle down to the floor.

The wagon was movingdrowsily and peacefully along the road. It was drawn by two mules and was filled with negro women asleep in chairs. Some of them wore drawers. The mulesthemselves didn’t wake at all, but ambled sedately on with the empty wagon and the overturned chairs, even when the car crashed into the shallow ditch and surged back onto the road again and thundered on without slowing. The thunder ceased, but the car rushed on, and still under its own momentum it began to sway from side to side as Bayard tried to drag Simon’s hands from the switch. But Simon knelt in the floor with his eyes shut tightly and the air blast toying with the grizzled remnant of his hair, holding the switch off with both Sands.

“Turn it loose!” Bayard shouted.

“Dat’s de way you stops it, Lawd! Dat’s de way you stops it, Lawd!” Simon chanted, keeping the switch covered with his hands while Bayard hammered them with his fist. And he clung to it until the car slowed and stopped. Then he fumbled the door open and descended to the ground. Bayard called to him, but he went on back along the road at a limping rapid shuffle.

“Simon!” Bayard called, but Simon’s shabby figure went on stiffly, like a man who has been deprived of the use of his legs for a long time. “Simon!” Bayard called again, but he neither slowed nor looked back,and Bayard started the car again and drove on until he could torn it about. Simon now stood in the ditch at the roadside, and his head was bent above something that engaged his hands when Bayard overtook him and stopped.

“Come on here and get in,” he commanded

“Naw, suh. I’ll walk,” Simon answered.

“Jump in, now,” Bayard said sharply. He opened the door, but Simon stood in the ditch with his hand thrust inside his shirt, and Bayard could see that he was shaking uncontrollably. “Come on, you old fool; I’m not going to hurt you.”

“I’ll walk home,” Simon repeated stubbornly but without heat. “You git on wid dat thing.”

“Ah, get in, Simon. I didn’t know I’d scared you that bad. I won’t do it again.”

“You git on home,” Simon said again. “Dey’ll be worried erbout you. You kin tell ‘um whar I’m at.”

Bayard watched him a moment, but Simon was not looking at him, and presently he slammed the door and went on. Nor did Simon look up even then, even when the car burst again into the thunder of roaring wings within a swirling cloud of dust that hung sluggishly after the thunder had died. Soon the wagon emerged from the dust, the mules now at a high flop-eared trot, and jingled past him, leaving behind it upon the dusty insect-rasped air a woman’s voice in a quavering wordless hysteria, passive and quavering and sustained. This faded slowly down the shimmering flat reaches of the valley and Simon removed from the breast of his shirt an object hung on a cord about his neck. It was small, vaguely globular and desiccated and was covered with soiled napped fur: the first joint of the hind leg of a rabbit, caught supposedly in a graveyard in the dark of the moon, and Simon rubbed it through the sweat on his forehead and on the back of his neck, then he returned it to his bosom. His hands were still trembling, and he put his hat on and got back onto the road and turned toward home through the dusty noon.

He drove on down the valley toward town, passing the never-closed iron gates and the serene white house among its old trees, and went on at speed. The sound of the unmuffled engine crashed into the dust and swirled it into lethargic bursting shapes, and faded punily across the fecund valley quick with cotton and corn. Just outside of town he came upon another negro, in a wagon, and he held the car straight upon the vehicle until the mules reared, tilting the wagon for an instant Then he swerved and whipped past with not an inch to spare, so close that the yelling negro in the wagon could see the lipless and say-age derision of his teeth.

He went on, then in a mounting swoop like a niggard zoom the cemetery with his great-grandfather in pompous effigy gazing out across the valley and his railroad, flashed past, and he thought of old Simon trudging along the dusty road toward home, clutching his rabbit’s foot, and again he felt savage and ashamed.

Then town among its trees, its shady streets like green tunnels along which tight lives accomplished their peaceful tragedies, an£ he closed the muffler and at a sedate pace he approached the square. The clock on the courthouse raised its four faces above the bowering elms, in glimpses seen between arching vistas of bordering oaks. Ten minutes to twelve. At twelve exactly his grandfather would repair to his office in the rear of the bank and there he would drink the pint of buttermilk which he brought inwith him every morning in a vacuum bottle, then for an hour he would sleep on the sofa in a dark corner of the room. As Bayard turned onto the square the tilted chair in the bank door was already vacant, and he slowed his car and eased it into the curb before a propped sandwich board. Fresh Catfish Today the board stated in letters of liquefied chalk, and through the screen doors behind it came a smell of refrigerated food—cheese and pickle, with a faint overtone of fried grease.

He stood for a moment on the sidewalk while the noon throng parted and flowed about him. Negroes slow and aimless as figures of a dark placid dream, with an animal odor, murmuring and laughing among themselves. There was in their consonantless murmuring something ready with mirth, in their laughter something grave and sad; country people— men in overalls or corduroy or khaki and without neckties, women in shapeless calico and sunbonnets and snuff-sticks; groups of young girls in stiff mail-order finery, the young heritage of their bodies’ grace dulled already by self-consciousness and labor and unaccustomed high heels and soon to be obscured forever by child-bearing; youths and young men in cheap tasteless suits and shirts and caps, weather-tanned and clean-limbed as race horses and a little belligerently blatant. Against the wall squatting a blind negro beggar with a guitar and a wire frame holding a mouthorgan to his lips, patterned the background of smells and sounds with a plaintive reiteration of rich monotonous chords, rhythmic as a mathematical formula but without music. He was a man of at least forty and his was that patient resignation of many sightless years, yet he too wore filthy khaki with a corporal’s stripes on one sleeve and a crookedly sewn Boy Scout emblem on the other, andon his breast a button commemorating the fourthLiberty Loan and a small metal brooch bearing two gold stars, obviously intended for female adornment. His weathered derby was encircled by an officer’s hat cord, and on the pavement between his feet sat a tin cup containing a dime and three pennies.

Bayard sought a coin in his pocket, and the beggar sensed his approach and his tune became a single repeated chord but without a break in the rhythm until the coin clinked into the cup, and still without a break in the monotony of his strumming and the meaningless strains’ of his mouthorgan, his left hand dropped groping a little to the cup and read the coin in a single motion, then once more the guitar and mouthorgan resumed their blended pattern. As Bayard turned away someone spoke at his side—a broad squat man with a keen weathered face and gray temples. He wore corduroys and boots, and his body was the supple body of a horseman and his brown still hands were the hands that horses love. MacCallum his name, one of a family of six brothers who lived eighteen miles away in the hills, and with whom Bayard and John hunted foxes and ‘coons during their vacations.

“Been hearing about that car of yours,” MacCallum said. “That’s her, is it?” He stepped down from the curb and moved easily about the car, examining it, his hands on his hips. “Too much barrel,”he said, “and she looks heavy in the withers. Quinsy. Have to use a curb on her, I reckon?”

“I don’t,” Bayard answered “Jump in and I’ll show you what she’ll do.”

“No, much obliged,” the other answered. He stepped onto the pavement again, among the negroes gathered to stare at the car. Along the street there came now in small groups children going home fromschool during the noon recess—little girls with colored boxes and books and skipping-ropes and talking sibilantly among themselves of intense feminine affairs, and boys in various stages of déshabille shouting and scuffling and jostling the little girls, who shrank together and gave the boys cold reverted glares. “Going to eat a snack,” he explained. He crossed the pavement and opened the screen door. “You ate yet?” he asked, looking back. “Come on in a minute, anyway.” And he patted his hip significantly.

The store was half grocery and confectionery and half restaurant. A number of customers stood about the cluttered but clean front section, with sandwiches and bottles of soda water, and the proprietor bobbed his head with flurried, slightly distrait affability above the counter to them. The rear half of the room was filled with tables at which a number of men and a woman or so, mostly country people, sat eating with awkward and solemn decorum. Next to this was the kitchen, filled with frying odors and the brittle hissing of it, where two negroes moved about like wraiths in a blue floating lethargy of smoke. They crossed this room also and MacCallum opened a door set in an outthrust angle of the wall and they entered a smaller room, or rather a large disused closet. There was a small window high in the wall, and a bare table and three or four chairs, and presently the younger of the two negroes followed them.

“Yes, suh, Mr. MacCallum and Mr. Sartoris.” He set two freshly rinsed glasses, to which water yet adhered in sliding drops, on the table and stood drying his hands on his apron. He had a broad untroubled black face, a reliable sort of face.

“Lemons and sugar and ice,” MacCallum said.

“You don’t want none of that soda pop, do you?” heasked Bayard. The negro bowed and was turning away when MacCallnm addressed Bayard, whereupon he paused with his hand on the door.

“No,” Bayard answered.“Rather have a toddy myself.”

“Yes, suh,” the negro agreed. “Y’all wants a toddy.” Someway he contrived to imply a grave approval, a vindication, and he bowed again with a sort of suave sense of the fine moment and turned door-ward again. Then he stepped aside as the proprietor: in a fresh apron entered at his customary distracted trot and stood rubbing his hands on his thighs.

“Morning, morning,” he said. “How’re you, Rafe? Bayard, I saw Miss Jenny and the old Colonel going up to Dr. Alford’s office the other day. Ain’t nothing wrong, is there?” His head was like an inverted egg; his hair curled meticulously away from the part in the center into two careful reddish-brown wings, like a toupee, and his eyes were a melting passionate brown.

“Come in here and shut that door,” MacCallum ordered, drawing the other into the room. He produced from beneath his coat a bottle of astonishing proportions and set it on the table. It contained a delicate amber liquid and the proprietor rubbed his hands on his thighs and his hot mild gaze gloated upon it.

“Great Savior,” he said, “where’d you have that demijohn hid? In your pants leg?” MacCallum uncorked the bottle and extended it and the proprietor leaned forward and smelled it, his eyes closed. He sighed.

“Henry’s” MacCallumsaid; “Best run he’s made yet. Reckon you’d take a drink if Bayard and me was to hold you?” The other cackled loudly, unctuously.

“Ain’t he a comical feller, now?” he asked Bayard. “Some joker, ain’t he?” He glanced at the table. “You ain’t got but two glasses. Wait till I—” Someone tapped at the door; the proprietor leaned his conical head to it and waggled his hand at them. MacCallum concealed the bottle without haste as the proprietor opened the door. It was the negro, with another glass, and lemons and sugar and a cracked bowl of ice. The proprietor admitted him.

“If they want me up front, tell ‘em I’ve stepped out but I’ll be back in a minute, Houston.”

“Yes, suh,” the negro replied, setting the things on the table; MacCallum produced the bottle again.

“What do you keep on telling your customers that old lie for?” he asked. “Everybody knows what you are doing/’

The proprietor cackled again, gloating upon the bottle. “Yes, sir,” he repeated, “he’s sore some joker. Well, you boys have got plenty of time, but I got to geton back and keep things running.”

“Go ahead,” MacCallum told him, and the proprietor made himself a toddy. He raised the glass, stirring it and sniffing it alternately while the others mixed lemons and whisky and water. Then he removed his spoon and put it on the table.

“Well, I hate to hurry a good thing mighty bad,” he said, “but business don’t wait on pleasure, you know.”

“Work does interfere with a man’s drinking,” MacCallum agreed.

“Yes, sir, it sure does,” the other replied. He lifted his glass. “Your father’s good health,” he said. He drank. “I don’t see the old gentleman in town much, nowadays.”

“No,” MacCallum answered. “He ain’t never got over Buddy being in the Yankee army. Claims he ain’t coming to town again until the Democratic party denies Woodrow Wilson.”

“It’ll be the best thing they ever done, if they was to recall him and elect a man like Debs or Senator Vardaman president,” the proprietor agreed sagely. “Well, that sure was fine,” he added. “Henry’s sure a wonder, ain’t he?” He set his glass down and turned to the door. “Well, you boys make yourselves at home. If you want anything, just call Houston.” And he bustled out at his distracted trot.

“Sit down,” MacCallum said. He drew up a chair, and Bayard drew another up opposite him across the table. “Deacon sure ought to know good whisky. He’s drunk enough of it to float his counters right on out the front door.” He filled his glass and pushed the bottle across to Bayard, and they drank again, quietly.

“You look bad, son,” MacCallum said suddenly, and Bayard raised his head and found the other examining him with his keen steady eyes. “Over-trained,” he added, and Bayard made an abrupt gesture of negation and raised his glass again, but he could still feel the other watching him intently but without rudeness. ‘Well, you haven’t forgot how to drink good whisky, anyhow...Why don’t you come out and take a week’s hunt? Got an old red we been saving for you. Been running him off and on for two years, now, with the young dogs. Ain’t put old General on him yet, because the old feller’ll nose him out, and I wanted to save him for you boys. John would have enjoyed that fox. You remember that night John cut across down to Samson’s bridge ahead of the dogs, and when we got to the river here come him and the fox floating along on that drift log, the fox on one end and John on the other, ringing that fool song as loud as he could yell? John wouldhave enjoyed this here fox. He outsmarts them young dogs every time. But old General’ll get him.”

Bayard sat with his head bent, taming his glass in his hand. He reached a packet of cigarettes from his jacket and shook a few of them onto the table at his hand and flipped the packet across the table to the other. But MacCallum made no move to take it. He drank his toddy steadily and refilled his glass and stirred his spoon slowly in it. Bayard lit one of his cigarettes and emptied his glass and reached for the bottle. “You look like hell, boy,” MacCallum repeated.

“Dry, I reckon,” Bayard answered in a voice as level as the other’s. He made himself another toddy, his cigarette smoking on the table edge beside him. He raised his glass, but instead of drinking he held it for a moment to his nose, and the small muscles at the base of his nostrils tautened whitely, then he swung the glass from him and with a steady hand he emptied it onto the floor. The other watched him quietly while he picked up the bottle again and poured the glass half full of raw liquor and sloshed a little water into it and tilted it down his throat. “I’ve been good too damn long,” he said aloud, and he fell to talking of the war. Not of combat, but rather of a life peopled by young men like fallen angels, and of a meteoric violence like that of fallen angels, beyond heaven or hell and partaking of both: doomed immortality and immortal doom.

MacCallum sat and listened quietly, drinking his whisky steadily and slowly and without appreciable effect, as though it were milk he drank; and Bayard talked on and presently found himself without surprise eating food. The bottle was now less than half full. The negro Houston had brought the food in and had his drink, taking it neat and without battingan eye. “Ef I had a cow datgive dat, de calf wouldn’t git no milk a-tall,” he said, “and I wouldn’t never churn. Thank’ee, Mr. MacCaHum, suh.”

Then he was out, and Bayard’s voice went on, filling the cubby-hole of a room, surmounting the odor of cheap food too quickly cooked and of sharp spilt whisky, with ghosts of a thing high-pitched as a hysteria, like a glare of fallen meteors on the dark retina of the world Again a light tap at the door, and the proprietor’s egg-shaped head and his hot diffident eyes.

“You gentlemen got everything you want?” he asked, rubbing his hands on his thighs.

“Come and get it,” MacCallum said, jerking his head toward the bottle, and the other made himself a toddy in his stale glass and drank it and stood while Bayard finished his tale of himself and an Australian major and two ladies in the Leicester lounge one evening (the Leicester lounge being out of bounds, and the Anzac lost two teeth and his girl, and Bayard himself got a black eye), watching the narrator with round melting astonishment.

“Great Savior,” he said, “the av’aytors was sure some hellraisers, wadn’t they? Well, I reckon they’re wanting me up front again. You got to keep on the jump to make a living, these days.” And he scuttled out again.

“I’ve been good too goddam long,” Bayard repeated harshly, watching MacCallum fill the two glasses. “That’s the only thing Johnny was ever good for. Kept me from getting in a rut Bloody rut, with a couple of old women hanging around me, and nothing to do except scare old niggers.” He drank his whisky and set the glass down on the table, still clutching it. “Damn ham-handed Hun,” he said. “He never could learn to fly properly. I kept trying to keep him fromgoing up there on that goddam popgun,” and he cursed his dead brother savagely. Then he raised his glass again, but halted it half way to his mouth. “Where in hell did my drink go?”

MacCallum reached the bottle and emptied it into Bayard’s glass, and he drank and banged the thick tumbler on the table and rose and lurched back against the wall. His chair crashed backward, and he braced himself, staring at the other. “I kept on trying to keep him from going up there, on that Camel. But he gave me a burst. Right across my nose.”

MacCallum rose also. “Come on here,” he said quietly, and he offered to take Bayard’s arm, but Bayard evaded him and they passed through the kitchen and traversed the long tunnel of the store. Bayard walked steadily enough, and the proprietor bobbed his head at them across the counter.

“Call again, gentlemen,” he said. “Call again.”

“All right, Deacon,” MacCallum answered. Bayard strode on without turning his head. As they passed the soda fountain a young lawyer standing beside a stranger, addressed him.

“Captain Sartoris, shake hands with Mr. Gratton here. Gratton was up on the British front for a while last year.” The stranger turned and extended his hand, but Bayard stared at him bleakly and walked so steadily on that the other involuntarily gave back a pace in order not to be overborne.

“Why, goddam his soul,” he said to Bayard’s back. The lawyer grasped his arm.

“He’s drunk,” he whispered quickly, “he’s drunk.”

“I don’t give a damn,” the other exclaimed loudly. “Because he was a goddam shave-tail he thinks—”

“Shhhh, shhhh,” the lawyer hissed. The proprietor appeared at the corner of his candy case, peering out with hot round alarm.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!’’ he exclaimed. The stranger made another violent movement, and Bayard stopped.

“Wait a minute while I bash his face in,” he told MacCallum, turning. The stranger thrust the lawyer aside and stepped forward.

“You never saw the day—” he began. MacCallum took Bayard’s arm firmly and easily.

“Come on here, boy.”

‘I’ll bash his bloody face in,” Bayard stated equably, watching the angry stranger with his bleak eyes. The lawyer grasped his companion’s arm again.

“Get away,” the other said, flinging him off. “Just let him try it. Come on, you limey—”

“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” the proprietor implored.

“Come on here, boy,” MacCallum said. “I’ve got to look at a horse.”

“A horse?” Bayard repeated. He turned obediently, then as an afterthought he paused and looked back. “Can’t bash your face in now,” he told the stranger. “Sorry. Got to look at a horse. Call for you at the hotel later.” But the stranger’s back was turned, and behind it the lawyer grimaced at MacCallum and waggled his hand.

“Get him away, MacCallum, for God’s sake.”

“Bash his face in later,” Bayard repeated. “Can’t bash yours, though, Eustace,” he told.the lawyer. “Taught us in ground-school never seduce a fool nor hit a cripple.”

“Come on, here,” MacCallum repeated, leading him away. At the door Bayard must stop again to light a cigarette, then they went on. It was three o’clock and again they walked among school children in released surges, sibilant with temporary freedom. Bayard strode steadily enough, and a little belligerently, and presently MacCallum turned into a side street and they went on before negro shops, and between a busy grist mill and a silent cotton gin they turned into a lane filled with tethered horses and mules. From the end of the lane a blacksmith’s anvil clanged,but they passed its ruby glow and the squatting overalled men along the shady wall, and came next to a high barred gate backing a long dun-colored brick building smelling of ammonia. A few men sat on the top of the gate, others leaned their crossed arms upon it, and from the paddock itself came voices, then through the slatted gate gleamed a haughty motionless shape of burnished flame.

The stallion stood against the yawning cavern of the livery stable door like a motionless bronze flame, and along its burnished coat ran at intervals little tremors of paler flame, little tongues of nervousness and pride. But its eye was quiet and arrogant, and occasionally and with a kingly air its gaze swept along the group at the gate with a fine disdain, without seeing them as individuals at all, and again little tongues of paler flame rippled flicking along its coat. About its head was a rope hackamore; it was tethered to a door post, and in the background a white man moved about at a respectful distance with a proprietorial air: beside him, a negro hostler with a tow sack tied about his middle with a string. MacCallum and Bayard halted at the gate, and the white man circled the stallion’s haughty immobility and crossed to them. The negro hostler came forth also, with a soft dirty cloth and chanting in a sad mellow singsong. The stallion permitted Mm to approach and suffered him to erase with his rag the licking nervous little flames that ran in renewed ripples under its skin.

“Ain’t he a picture, now?” the white man demanded of MacCallum, leaning his elbow on thegate. A cheap nickel watch was attached to his suspender loop by a length of rawhide lace leather worn black and soft with age, and his shaven beard was heaviest from the corners of his mouth to his chin; he looked always as though he were chewing tobacco with his mouth open. He was a horse trader by profession, and he was usually engaged in litigation with the railroad company over the violent demise of some of his stock by its agency. “Look at that nigger, now,” he added. “He’ll let Tobe handle him like a baby. I wouldn’t get within ten foot of him, myself. Dam’f I know how Tobe does it Must be some kin between a nigger and a animal, I always claim.”

“I reckon he’s afraid you’ll be crossing the railroad with him some day about the time 3’ is due,” MacCallum said drily.

“Yes, I reckon I have the hardest luck of any feller in this county,” the other agreed. “But they got to settle this time: I got’em dead to rights this time”

“Yes,” MacCallum said. “The railroad company ought to furnish that stock of your’n with time tables.” The other onlookers guffawed.

“Ah, the company’s got plenty of money,” the trader rejoined. Then he said: “You talk like I might have druv them mules in front of that train. Lemme tell you how it come about—”

“I reckon you won’t never drive him in front of no train.” MacCallum jerked his head toward the stallion. The negro burnished its shimmering coat, crooning to it in a monotonous singsong. The trader laughed.

“I reckon not,” he admitted. “Not less’n Tobe goes, too. Just look at him, now. I wouldn’t no more walk up to that animal than I’d fly.”

“I’m going to ride that horse,” Bayard said suddenly.

“What hoss?” the trader demanded, and the other onlookers watched Bayard climb the gate and vault over into the lot “You let that hoss alone, young feller,” the trader added. But Bayard paid him no heed He turned from the gate, the stallion swept its regal gaze upon him and away. “You let that hoss alone,” the trader shouted, “or I’ll have the law on you.”

“Let him be,” MacCallum said.

“And let him damage a fifteen hundred dollar stallion? That hoss’llkill him. You,Sartoris!”

MacCallum drew a wad of bills enclosed by a rubber band from his hip pocket “Let him be,” he repeated “That’s what he wants.”

The trader glanced at the money with quick calculation. “I take you gentlemen to witness—” he began loudly, then he ceased and they watched tensely as Bayard approached the stallion. The beast swept its haughty glowing eye upon him again and lifted its head without alarm and snorted, and the negro crouched against its shoulder and his crooning chant rose to a swifter beat Then the beast snorted again and swept its head up, snapping the rope like a gossamer thread, and the negro grasped at the flying rope-end.

“Git away, whitefolks,” he said hurriedly. “Git away, quick.”

But the stallion eluded his hand It cropped its teeth in a vicious arc and the negro leaped sprawling as the animal’s whole body soared like a bronze explosion. But Bayard had dodged beneath the sabring hooves and as the horse swirled the myriad flicking tongues of its glittering coat the spectators saw that the man had contrived to take a turn with the rope-end about its jaws, then they saw the animal rear again, dragging the man from the ground and whipping hisbody like a rag upon its flashing arc. Then it stopped trembling as Bayard closed its nostrils with the twisted rope, and suddenly he was upon its back while still it stood with lowered head and rolling eyes, rippling its burnished coat into quivering tongues of flame before exploding again.

The beast burst like unfolding bronze wings: a fluid desperation; the onlookers tumbled away from the gate and hurled themselves to safety as the gate splintered to matchwood beneath its soaring volcanic thunder. Bayard crouched on its shoulders and dragged its mad head around and they swept down the lane, spreading pandemonium among the horses and mules tethered and patient before the blacksmith shop and among the wagons there. Where the lane debouched into the street a group of negroes scattered before them, and without a break in its stride the stallion soared over a small negro child clutching a stick of striped candy directly in its path. A wagon drawn by mules was turning into the lane: these reared madly before the wild slack-jawed face of the white man in the wagon, and again Bayard dragged his thunderbolt around and headed it away from the square. Down the lane behind him, through the dust the spectators ran, shouting, the trader among them, and Rafe MacCallum still clutching his roll of money.

The stallion moved beneath him like a tremendous mad music, uncontrolled, splendidly uncontrollable. The rope served only to curb its direction, not its speed, and among shouts from the pavement on either side he swung the animal into another street that broke suddenly upon his vision. This was a quieter street; soon they would be in the country and the stallion could exhaust its rage without the added hazards of motors and pedestrians. Voices faded behind himinto the thunder of shod hooves: “Runaway! Runaway!” but this street was deserted save for a small automobile going in the same direction, and further along beneath the slumbrous tunnel of the trees, bright small spots of color scuttled out of the street and clotted on one side. Children. Hope they stay there, he said to himself. His eyes were streaming a little; beneath him the surging lift and fall; in his nostrils a pungent sharpness of rage and energy and heat like smoke from the animal’s body, and he swept past the motor car, remarking for a flashing second a woman’s face and a mouth partly open and two eyes round with a serene astonishment. But the face flashed away without registering on his mind and he saw the children, small taut shapes of fear in bright colors, and on the other side of the street a negro man playing a hose onto the sidewalk, and beside him a second negro with a pitchfork.

Someone screamed from a neighboring veranda, and the group of children broke, shrieking; a small figure in a white shirt and diminutive pale blue pants darted from the curb into the street, and Bayard leaned forward and dragged at the rope, swerving the beast toward the opposite sidewalk, where the two negroes stood. The small figure came on, flashed safely behind, then rushing green beneath the stallion’s feet; a tree trunk like a wheel spoke in reverse, and the animal struck clashing fire from wet concrete, slipped, lunged, then crashed down; and for Bayard, a red shock, then blackness. The horse scrambled to its feet and whirled and struck viciously at the prone rider with its forefeet, but the negro with the pitchfork drove it away, whereupon it trotted stiffly back up the street and passed the slowing motor car with the woman driver. At the end of the street it submitted docilely to capture by the negrohostler. Rafe MacCallum still clutched his roll of bills.

6

They gathered him up and brought him to town in a commandeered motor car and roused Dr. Peabody from slumber. Dr. Peabody profanely bandaged Bayard’s unconscious head and, when he came to, gave him a drink from the bottle which resided in the littered waste basket and threatened to telephone Miss Jenny if Bayard didn’t go straight home. Rafe MacCallum promised to see that he went, and the owner of the impressed automobile offered to drive him. It was a Ford body with, in place of a tonneau, a miniature one-room cabin of sheet iron and larger than a dog kennel, in each painted geometrical window of which a painted housewife simpered benignantly above a painted sewing machine, and into which an actual sewing machine neatly fitted, borne thus about the countryside by the agent The agent’s name was V. K. Suratt and he now sat with his shrewd plausible face behind the wheel. Bayard with his humming head sat beside him, and to the fender clung a youth with brown forearms and a slanted extremely new straw hat, who let his limber body absorb the jolts with negligent young skill as they rattled sedately out of town on the valley road.

The drink Dr. Peabody had given him, instead of quieting his jangled nervous system, rolled sluggishly and hotly in his stomach and served only to nauseate him a little, and against his closed eyelids red antic shapes rolled in throbbing and tedious cycles. He watched them dully and without astonishment as they emerged from blackness and whirled sluggishlyand consumed themselves and reappeared, each time a Hole fainter as his mind cleared And yet, somewhere blended with them, yet at the same time apart and beyond them with a serene aloofness and steadfast among their senseless-convolutions, was a head with twin dark wings of hair. It seemed to have some relation to the instant itself as it culminated in crashing blackness; at the same time it seemed, for all its aloofness, to be a part of the whirling ensuing chaos which now enveloped him; a part of it, yet bringing into the vortex a sort of constant coolness like a faint, shady breeze. So it remained, aloof and not quite distinct, while the coiling shapes faded into a dull unease of physical pain from the jolting of the car, leaving about him like an echo that cool serenity and something more—a sense of shrinking yet fascinated distaste, of which he or something he had done, was the object.

It was getting well into evening. On either hand cotton and corn showed in green spears upon the rich, dark soil, and in the patches of green woodland doves called moodily. After a time Suratt turned from the highway into a faint; rutted wagon road between a field and a patch of woods and they drove straight into the sun, and Bayard held his hat before his face.

“Sun hurt yo’ head?” Suratt asked beside him, “Taint long, now,” he added. The road wound presently into the woods where the sun was intermittent, and it rose gradually toward a low merest on which trees stood like a barred grate against the western sky. They crossed this Mil and the land fell away in ragged ill-tended fields, and beyond them in a clump of fruit trees and a grove of silver poplars pale as absinthe and twinkling ceaselessly without wind, a weathered small house squatted. Beyond itand much larger loomed a barn gray arid gaunt withage. The road forked here. One faint arm curvedsandily away toward the house; the other went onbetween rank weeds toward the barn. The youth onthe fender leaned his head into the car, “Drive on to the barn,” he directed.

Suratt obeyed. Beyond the bordering weeds a fence straggled in limp dilapidation, and from the weeds the handles of a plow stood at a gaunt angle while its shard rusted peacefully in the undergrowth, and other implements rusted half concealed in the growth—-skeletons of labor healed over by the earth they were to have violated, kinder than they. The fence turned at an angle and Suratt stopped the car and the youth stepped down and opened a warped wooden gate and Suratt drove on into the barnyard where stood a wagon with drunken wheels and a home-made bed, and the rusting skeleton of a Ford car. Low down upon its domed and hoodless radiator the two lamps gave it an expressions beetling patient astonishment, like a skull, and a lean cow ruminated and watched them without interest.

The barn doors sagged drunkenly from broken hinges, held to the posts with twists of baling wire; beyond, the cavern of the hallway yawned in stale desolation—a travesty of earth’s garnered fullness and its rich inferences. Bayard sat on the fender and leaned his bandaged head back against the car body and watched Suratt and the youth enter the barn and disappear slowly upward on invisible ladder rungs. The cow stood yet in ruminant dejection, and upon the yellow surface of a pond enclosed by banks of trodden and sun-cracked day beneath a clump of locust shrubs and willows, geese drifted like small muddy clouds. The sun fell in a long slant upon their rumps and their suave necks and upon the cow’s leanrhythmically twitching flank, ridging her visible ribs with dingy gold. Presently Suratt’s legs fumbled into sight, followed by his cautious body, and after him the youth with his slanted hat slid easily down the perpendicular ladder, letting his body from rung to rung in easy one-handed swoops.

He emerged carrying an earthen jug close against his leg. Suratt followed in his neat tieless blue shirt and jerked his head at Bayard, and they turned the corner of the barn and retreated along the wall, among waist-high jimson weeds. Bayard rose and followed and overtook them as the youth with his jug slid with an agile unceasing motion between two lax strands of barbed wire. Suratt stooped through more sedately and held the top strand taut and pressed the lower one down with his foot until Bayard was through. Behind the barn the land descended into shadow toward a junglish growth of willow and elder, against which a huge beech and a clump of saplings stood like mottled ghosts, and from which a cool dankness rose like a breath to meet them. The spring welled from the roots of the beech into a wooden frame buried to the edge in white sand that quivered ceaselessly and delicately beneath the water’s limpid unrest, and strayed on away into the willow and elder growth without a sound.

The earth about the spring was trampled smooth and packed as an earthen floor. Near the spring a blackened iron pot sat on four bricks, beneath it was a heap of pale wood ashes and a litter of extinct brands and charred fagot-ends. Against the pot leaned a scrubbing board with a ridged metal face polished to a dull even gleam like old silver, and a rusty tin cup hung from a nail in the beech tree above the spring. The youth set the jug down and he md Suratt squatted gravely beside it.

“I don’t know if we ain’t a-goin’ to git in trouble givin’Mr. Bayard whisky, Hub,” Suratt said “Still, Doc Peabody give him one dram hisself, so I reckon we kingive .him one mo’.Ain’t that right, Mr. Bayard?” Squatting he glanced up at Bayard with his shrewd affable face. Hub twisted the corncob stopper from the jug and passed it to Suratt, who tendered it to Bayard “I! been knowin’Mr. Bayard ever since he was a chap in knee pants,” Suratt confided to Hub, “but this is the first time me and him ever taken a drink together. Ain’t that so, Mr. Bayard?...I reckon you’ll want a drinkin’ cup, won’t you?” But Bayard was already drinking, with the jug tinted across his horizontal forearm and the mouth held to his lips by the same hand, as it should be done. “He knows how to drink outen a jug, don’t he?” Suratt added “I knowed he was all right,” he said in a tone of confidential vindication. Bayard lowered the jug and returned it to Suratt, who offered it formally to Hub.

“Go ahead,” Hub said “Hit it.” Suratt did so, with measured pistonings of his taut throat in relief against the brooding green of the jungle wall Above the stream gnats whirled and spun in a leveling ray of sunlight like erratic golden chaff. Suratt lowered the jug and passed it to Hub and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand

“How you fed now, Mr. Bayard?” he asked Then he said heavily: “You’ll have to excuse me. I reckon I ought to said Captain Sartoris, oughtn’t I?”

“What for?” Bayard asked He squatted also on hi heels, against the bole of the tree beside the limpid soundless laughing of the spring. The rising slope of ground behind them hid the barn and the house, and the three of them squatted in a small bowl of peacefulness remote from the world and its rumors, filled with the cool unceasing breathing of the spring and a seeping of sunlight among the elders and willows like a thinly diffused wine. On the surface of the spring the sky lay reflected, stippled with windless beech leaves. Hub squatted leanly with his brown forearms clasped about his knees, smoking a cigarette beneath the downward tilt of his straw hat. Suratt was across the spring from him. He wore a faded clean blue shirt, and in contrast to it his hands and face were a rich even brown, like mahogany. The jug sat rotundly, benignantly between them.

“Yes, sir,” Suratt repeated, “I always find the best cure for a wound is plenty of whisky. Doctors, these here fancy young doctors, ‘11 tell a feller different, but old Doc Peabody hisself cut off my gran’pappy’s leg while gran’pappy laid back on the dinin’ table with a demijohn in his hand and a mattress and a chair across his laigs and fo’ men a-holdin’ him down, and him cussin’ and singin’ so scandalous the women-folks and the chillen went down to the pasture behind the barn and waited. Take some mo’,” he said, and he reached the jug across the spring and Bayard drank again. “Reckon you’re beginnin’ to feel pretty fair, ain’t you?”

“Damned if I know,” Bayard answered. “It’s dynamite, boys.”

Suratt with the lifted jug guffawed, then he lipped it and his Adam’s apple pumped again in arched relief against the wall of elder and willow. The elder would soon flower, with pale clumps of tiny blooms. Miss Jenny made a little wine of it every year. Good wine, if you knew how and had the patience. Elder flower wine. Like a ritual for a children’s game; a game played by little girls in small pale dresses, between supper and twilight Above the bowl where sunlight yet came in a leveling beam, gnats whirledand spun like dust-motes in a quiet disused room. Suratt’s voice went on affably, ceaselessly recapitulant, in polite admiration of the hardness of Bayard’s head and the fact that this was the first time he and Bayard had ever taken a drink together. They drank again, and Hub began to borrow cigarettes of Bayard and he became also a little profanely and robustly anecdotal in his country idiom, about whisky and girls and dice; and presently he and Suratt were arguing amicably about work. They seemed to be able to sit tirelessly and without discomfort on their heels, but Bayard’s legs had soon grown < numb and he straightened them, tingling with released blood, and he now sat with his back against the tree and his long legs straight before him, hearing Suratt’s voice without listening to it.

His head was now no more than a sort of taut discomfort; at times it seemed to float away from his shoulders and hang against the wall of green like a transparent balloon within which or beyond which that face that would neither emerge completely and distinguishably nor yet fade completely away and so trouble him no longer, lingered with shadowy exasperation—two eyes round with a grave shocked astonishment, two lifted hands flashing behind little white shirt and blue pants swerving into a lifting rush plunging clatter crash blackness...

Suratt’s slow plausible voice went on steadily, but without any irritant quality. It seemed to fit easily into the still scene, speaking of earthy things. “Way I learnt to chop cotton,” he was saying, “my oldest brother taken and put me in the same row ahead of him. Started me off, and soon’s I taken a lick or two, here he come behind me. And ever’ time my hoe chopped once I could year his’n chop twice. I never had no shoes in them days, neither,” headded drily.

“So I had to learn to chop fast But I swo’ then, come what mought, that I wouldn’t never plant nothin’ in the ground, soon’s I could he’p myself. It’s all right for folks that owns land, but folks like my folks was don’t never own no land, and ever’ time we made a furrow, we was scratchin’ earth for somebody else” The gnats danced and whirled more madly yet in the sun above the secret places of the stream, and the sun’s light was taking on a rich copper tinge. Suratt rose. “Well, boys, I got to be gittin’ back to’ds town, myself.” He looked at Bayard again with his shrewd talkative face. “I reckon Mr. Bayard’s clean got over that knock he taken, ain’t he?”

“Dammit,” Bayard said, “quit calling me Mr. Bayard.”

Suratt picked up the jug. “I knowed he was all right, when you got to know him,” he said to Hub. “I been knowin’ him since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, but me and him jest ain’t been throwed together like this. I was raised a pore boy, fellers, while Mr. Bayard’s folks has lived on that ‘ere big place with plenty of money in the bank and niggers to wait on ‘em. But he’s all right,’’ he repeated. “He ain’t goin’ to say nothin’ about who give turn this here whisky.”

“Let him tell, if he wants,” Hub answered. “Idon’t give a damn.”

They drank again. The sun was almost gone and from the secret marshy places of the stream came a fairy-like piping of young frogs. The gaunt invisible cow lowed barnward, and Hub replaced the corncob in the mouth of the jug and drove it home with his palm and they mounted the slope above the spring and crawled through the fence. The cow stood in the barn door and watched diem approach and lowed again, moody and mournful, and the geese hadleft the pond and they now paraded sedately across the barnyard toward the house, in the door of which, framed by two crepe-myrtle bushes, a woman stood.“Hub,” she said in a flat country voice.

“Goin’ to town,” Hub answered shortly. “Sue’ll have to milk.”

The woman stood quietly in the door. Hub carried the jug into the barn. The cow turned and followed him, but he heard her and turned and gave her a resounding kick in her gaunt ribs and cursed her without heat. Presently he reappeared and went on to the gate and opened it and stood so until Suratt drove through. Then he closed it and wired it to again and swung onto the fender. But Bayard moved over in the seat and Hub got inside. The woman stood yet in the door, watching them quietly. About the doorstep the geese surged erratically with discordant cries, their necks undulant and suave as formal gestures in a pantomime.

The shadow of the poplar grove fell long across the untidy fields, and the car pushed its elongated shadow before it like the shadow of a huge hump-shouldered bird. They mounted the sandy hill in the last of the sun among the trees, and dropped downward out of sunlight and into violet dusk; The road was soundless with sand and the car lurched in the worn and shifting ruts and so out of the woods, between tilled fields again and onto the broad valley road.

The warring moon stood overhead. As yet it gave off no light though, and they drove on toward town, passing an occasional belated country wagon homeward bound; these Suratt greeted with a grave gesture of his brown hand, and presently where the road crossed a wooden bridge among more willow and elder where dusk was yet denser and more palpable,Suratt stopped the car and climbed out over the door. “You fellers set still,” he said. “I won’t be but a minute.” They heard him at the rear of the car, then he reappeared with a tin bucket and he let himself gingerly down the rank roadside bank beside the bridge. Water chuckled and murmured beneath the bridge, invisible with twilight, its murmur burdened with the voice of cricket and frog. Above the willows that marked its course gnats still spun and whirled, for bullbats appeared from nowhere in long swoops, in mid-swoop vanished, then appeared again against the serene sky swooping, silent as drops of water on a pane of glass; swift and noiseless and intent as though their wings were feathered with twilight and with silence.

Suratt scrambled up the bank, with his pail, and he removed the radiator cap and tilted the bucket above the mouth of it. The moon stood yet without emphasis overhead, yet a faint shadow of the bucket fell upon the hood of the car and upon the pallid planking of the bridgethe leaning willow fronds were repeated, faintly but delicately distinct. The last of the water gurgled with faint rumblings into the engine’s interior and Suratt replaced the bucket and climbed over the blind door again. The lights operated from a generator; he turned these on now. While the car was in low speed the lights glared to a soundless crescendo, but when he let the clutch in they dropped to a wavering glow no more than a luminous shadow on the unrolling monotonous ribbon of the road.

Night was an accomplished thing before they reached town. Across the unemphatic land the lights on the courthouse clock were like yellow beads suspended above the trees, on the dark horizon line, and upon the green afterglow in the west a column of smoke stood like a balanced plume. Suratt put themout at the restaurant and drove on, and they entered and the proprietor lifted his conical head and his round melting eyes from behind the soda fountain.

“Great Savior, boy,” he exclaimed. “Ain’t you gone home yet? Doc Peabody’s been huntin’ you ever since four o’clock, andMiss Jenny drove to town in the carriage, lookin’ for you. You’ll kill yourself.”

“Get to hell back yonder, Deacon,” Bayard answered, “and bring me and Hub about two dollars’ worth of ham and eggs.”

Later they returned for the jug in Bayard’s car, Bayard and Hub and a third young man, freight agent at the railway station, with three negroes and a bull fiddle in the rear seat But they drove no further than the edge of the field above the house and stopped here while Hub went on afoot down the sandy weed-hedged road toward the barn in its looming silver solitude. The moon stood pale and cold overhead, and on all sides insects shrilled in the dusty undergrowth. In the rear seat the negroes murmured among themselves.

“Fine night,” Mitch, the freight agent, suggested. But Bayard smoked his cigarette moodily, his head closely helmeted in its white bandage. Moon and insects were one, audible and visible, dimensionless and unsourced.

After a while Hub materialized against the dissolving vagueness of the road, crowned by the silver gleam of his hat, and he swung the jug onto the door and removed the stopper. Mitch passed it to Bayard.

“Drink,” Bayard said shortly, and Mitch did so, then the others drank.

“We ain’t got no thin’ for the niggers to drink out of,” Hub said.

“That’s so,” Mitch agreed. He turned in his seat, “Ain’t one of you boys got a cup or something?” The negroes murmured again, questioning one another in mellow consternation-

“I know” Bayard said. He got out and lifted the hood and removed the cap from the breather-pipe, “It’ll taste a little like oil for a drink or two, but you boys won’t notice it after that.”

“Naw, sub,” the negroes agreed in chorus. Onetook the cup and wiped it out with the corner of hiscoat, and they top drank in turn, with smacking expulsions of breath. Then Bayard replaced the cap and go t into his seat.

“Anybody want another right now?” Hub asked,poising the corncob above the jug mouth.

“Give Mitch another,” Bayard directed. “He’ll have to catch up.’’

Mitch drank again briefly. Then Bayard took the jug and tilted it The others watched him respectfully.

“Dam’f he don’t drink it,” Mitch murmured. “I’d be afraid to hit it so often, if I was you.”

“It’s my damned head.” Bayard lowered the jug and passed it to Hub. “I keep thinking another drink will ease it off some.”

“Doc put that bandage on too tight,” Hub said. “You want it loosened a little?”

“I don’t know.” Bayard lit another cigarette and threw the match away. “I believe I’ll take it off. It’s been on there long enough.” He raised his hands and fumbled at the bandage.

“You better let it alone,” Mitch said. But Bayard fumbled at the fastening, then he slid his fingers beneath a turn of the cloth and tugged at it savagely.

One of the negroes leaned forward with a pocket knife and severed it, and they watched quietly while Bayard stripped it off and flung it away.

“You ought not to done that,” Mitch told him.

“Ah, let him take it off, if he wants,” Hub said. “He’s all right.” He got in and stowed the jug away between his knees. Bayard backed the car around. The sandy road hissed beneath its broad tires and rose shaling into the woods again where the dappled moonlight was intermittent, treacherous with dissolving vistas of shadow and formless growth. Invisible and sourceless among the shifting patterns of light and shade whip-poor-wills were like flutes tongued liquidly. The road passed out of the woods and descended, with sand in shifting and silent lurches, and they emerged between fields flattening away to the straight valley road and turned onto it and away from town,

The car swept onward, borne on the sustained hiss of its muffled intake like a dry sibilance of sand in a huge hour glass. The negroes in the back murmured quietly among themselves in mellow snatches, mellow snatches of laughter whipped from their lips like scraps of torn paper swirling away behind. They passed the iron gates and Bayard’s home dreaming serenely in the moonlight among its trees, and the silent boxlike flag station and the metal-roofed cotton gin on the railroad siding. Then the road rose into the hills. It was broad and smooth and empty for all its winding, and the negroes sat now a little tensely anticipatory. But Bayard drove at a steady smooth gait,, not slow, but hot anything like what they had expected of him. Twice more they stopped and drank, and then from an ultimate hilltop they looked downward upon, clustered lights again. Hub produced the breather cap and they drank once more.

Through streets identical with those at home they moved smoothly, toward an identical square. People along the streets turned and looked after them curiously. They crossed the square without stopping and into another quiet street. There were no arc lights at the street intersections, since there was a moon, and they went on between broad lawns and shaded windows, and presently beyond an iron fence and set well back among ancient trees, lighted windows hung in ordered tiers like rectangular lanterns strung among the branches.

They stopped here in shadow. The negroes descended and lifted the bass viol out, and a guitar. The third negro held a slender tube frosted over with keys upon which the intermittent moon glinted in hushed glints, and they stood with their heads together, murmuring among themselves and touching plaintive muted chords from the strings. Then the one with the clarinet raised it to his lips.

The tunes were old tunes. Some of them were sophisticated tunes and formally intricate, but in the rendition this was lost and all of them were imbued instead with a plaintive similarity, a slurred and rhythmic simplicity, and they drifted in rich plaintive chords upon the silver air fading, dying in minor reiterations along the treacherous vistas of moon and shadow. They played again, an old waltz. The college Cerberus came across the dappled lawn to the fence, but without antagonistic intent. Across the street, in the shadows there, other listeners stood; a car approached and slowed into the curb and shut off motor and lights, and in the tiered windows heads leaned, aureoled against the lighted rooms behind, without individuality at this distance but feminine and delicately and divinely young.

At last they played “Home, Sweet Home” andwhen the rich minor died away, across to them came a soft clapping of slender palms. Then Mitch sang “Goodnight, Ladies” in his true, oversweet tenor, and the young hands were more importunate; and as they drove away the slender heads leaned aureoled with bright hair in the lighted windows and the soft dapping drifted after them for a long while, fainter and fainter in the silver silence.

At the top of the first hill out of town they stopped and Hub removed the breather cap. Behind them random lights among the trees, and it was as though there came yet to them across the hushed world that sound of young palms like flung delicate flowers before their youth and masculinity, and they drank without speaking, lapped yet in the fading magic of the lost moment Mitch sang tp himself softly; the car slid purring on again. The road dropped curving smoothly, empty and blanched. Bayard broke the spell

“Cut out, Hub,” he said. Hub bent forward and reached under the dash and the car slid on with a steady leashed muttering like waking thunderous wings, then the road flattened in a long swoop toward another rise and the muttering lept to crescendo and the car shot forward with neck-snapping violence. The negroes’ murmur ceased, then one of them raised a wailing shout.

“Reno lost his hat,’’ Hub said, looking back.

“He don’t need it,” Bayard shouted in reply. The car roared up this hill and rushed across the crest of it and flashed around a tight “banked curve.

“Oh, Lawd,” the negro wailed “Mr. Bayard!” His words whipped away behind like stripped leaves. “Lemme out, Mr. Bayard!”

“Jump out, then,” Bayard answered. The road fell from beneath them like a tilting floor and awayacross a valley, straight now as a string. The negroes crouched with their eyes shut against the air blast, clutching their instruments. The speedometer showed 55 and 60 and turned slowly on. Mad rushing miles sped beneath them, sparse houses loomed into the headlights’ sweep, flashed slumbering away, and fields and patches of woodland like tunnels, and still they roared on beneath the silver night across the black and silver land.

The road wound among the hills. Whip-poor-wills called on either side, one to another in quiring liquid astonishment at their thunderous phantom; at intervals when the headlights swept in the road’s abrupt windings two spots of pale fire blinked in the dust before the bird blundered awkwardly somewhere beneath the radiator. The ridge rose steadily, with wooded slopes falling away on either hand. Sparse negro cabins squatted upon the slopes or beside the road, dappled with shadow and lightless and profound with slumber; beneath trees before them wagons stood or warped farm implements leaned, shelterless, after the shiftless fashion of negroes.

The road dipped, then rose again in a long slant broken by another dip; then it stood directly before them like a wall. The car shot upward and over the dip, left the road completely, then swooped dreadfully on, and the negroes’ concerted wail whipped forlornly away. Then the ridge attained its crest and the car’s thunder ceased and it came slowly to a stop. The negroes sat now in the bottom of the tonneau.

“Is dis heaven?” one murmured after a time.

“Dey wouldn’t let you in heaven, wid licker on yo’ breaf and no hat, feller,” another said.

“Ef de Lawd don’t take no better keer of me dan He done of dat hat, I don’t wanter go dar, noways,” the first rejoined.

“Mmmmm,” the second agreed.“When us come down dat ‘ere las’ hill, dis yere cla’inet almos’ blowed clean outen my han’,, let ‘lone my hat.”

“And when us jumped over dat ‘ere lawg er whut-ever it wuz back dar,” the, third one added, “I thought for a minute dis whole auto’bile done blowedoutenmy han’.”

They drank again. It was high here, and the air moved with gray coolness. On either hand lay a valley filled with shadow and with ceaseless whip-poor-wills; beyond these valleys the silver earth rolled on into the sky. Across it, sourceless and mournful and far, a dog howled. Before them the lights on the courthouse clock were steadfast and yellow and unwinking in the dissolving distance, but in all other directions the world rolled away in slumbrous ridges, milkily opaline. Bayard’s head felt as cool and clear as a clapperless and windless bell. Within it that head emerged clearly at last, those two eyesround with grave astonishment, winged serenely by two dark wings of hair. He sat for a while in the motionless car, gazing into the sky.

“It was that Benbow girl,”he said to himself quietly.

All of her instincts were antipathetic toward him, toward his violence and his brutally obtuse disregard of all the qualities which composed her being. His idea was like a trampling of heavy feet in those cool corridors of hers, in that grave serenity in which her days accomplished themselves; at the very syllables of his name her instincts brought her upstanding and under arms against him, thus increasing, doubling the sense of violation by the act of repulsing him and by the necessity for it. And yet, despite her armed sentinels, he still crashed with that hot violence of his through the bastions and thundered at the very inmost citadel of her being. Even chance seemed to abet him, lending to his brutal course a sort of theatrical glamor, a tawdry simulation of the virtues which the reasons (if he had reasons) for his actions outwardly ridiculed. That mad flaming beast he rode almost over her car and then swerved it with an utter disregard of consequences to himself onto a wet sidewalk in order to avoid a frightened child; the pallid, suddenly dreaming calm of his bloody face from which violence had been temporarily wiped as with a damp cloth, leaving it still with that fine bold austerity of Roman statuary, beautiful as a flame shaped in bronze and cooled: the outward form of its energy but without its heat,

Her appetite was gone at sapper, and Aunt Sally mouthed her prepared soft food and mumbled querulously at her because she would not eat But eat she could not; there was still between her and any desire for food the afternoon’s experience like a recurring echo in her violated corridors—the mad rash of the beast and its rider like a bronze tidal wave, into which the small running figure in white and pale blue was sucked and overwhelmed and spewed forth again unscathed while the wave spent its blind fury and ebbed, leaving the rider prone on the wet sidewalk while the horse stood erect like a man and struck at him with its forefeet And partly because that with recurrence of the picture her sense of irremediable violation increased and partly through irritation and anger with herself because it did, food choked her; she could not swallow it.

Later Aunt Sally sat and talked monotonously above her interminable fancy-work. Aunt Sally would never divulge what is was to be when completed, nor for whom, and she had been working on it for fifteen years, carrying always about with her a shapeless bag of dingy threadbare brocade containing odds and ends of colored fabric in all possible shapes. She could never bring herself to trim any of them to any pattern, so she shifted and fitted and mused and shifted them like pieces of a puzzle picture, trying to fit them to a pattern or to create a pattern about them without cutting them, smoothing her colored scraps on a card table with flaccid, patient putty-colored fingers, shifting and shifting them. From the bosom of her dress the needle Narcissa had threaded for her dangled its spidery skein,

Across the room Narcissa sat on her curled legs, with a book. Aunt Sally’s voice droned on with bland querulous interminability, and Narcissa turned the pages restively under her unseeing eyes. Suddenly she rose and laid the book down and crossed the hall into another room and sat in the half-light at her piano: But still between herself and the familiar keyboard the thunderous climacteric of the afternoon’s moment recurred and she saw his calm and bloodless face as a piece of flotsam unwelcome and too heavy to move, washed onto the grave unshadowed beach of her days, disrupting that serene constancy to which she clung so fiercely; and at last she rose with abrupt decision and went to the telephone.

Miss Jenny thanked her for her solicitude tardy, and dared to say that Bayard was all right, still an active member of the so-called human race, that is, since they had received no official word from the coroner. No, she had heard nothing of him since Loosh Peabody had ‘phoned her at four o’clock that Bayard was on his way home with a broken head. The broken head she readily believed, but the otherpart of the message she had put no credence in whatever, having lived with those damn Sartorises eighty years and knowing that home would be the last place in the world a Sartoris with a broken head would ever consider going. No, she was not even interested in his present whereabouts, and she hoped he hadn’t injured the horse? Horses were valuable animals.

Well, if Miss Jenny wasn’t alarmed, she certainly had no call to be, and she returned to the living room and explained to Aunt Sally whom she had been talking to and why, and drew a low chair to the lamp and picked up her book. She put the afternoon from her mind deliberately, and for a while and with a sort of detachment she watched her other self sink further and further into the book, until at last the book absorbed her attention. But then the vacuum of her relaxed will roused her again, and although she read deliberately on, a minor part of her consciousness probed ceaselessly, seeking the reason, until with a stabbing rush like a touched nerve it filled her mind again—the bronze fury of them, the child become an intent and voiceless automaton of fear, Bayard’s bleeding head chiseled and calm and cold. Then the long effort of thrusting him without her bastions again.

Aunt Sally fumbled her colored scraps together and returned them to their receptacle and rose and said goodnight and hobbled from the room. Narcissa sat and turned the pages on, hearing the other mount the stairs with measured laborious tappings of her ebony stick, and for a while longer she read with a mounting crescendo of nervous effort. For a paragraph or two, sometimes for a page, the book would absorb her; then again she would find her muscles tensing as she relived the afternoon. She flung the book away and returned to the piano again, determined to exorcise it, but Aunt Sally thumped on the floor overhead with her stick, and she desisted and returned to her discarded book. So it was with actual relief that she greeted Dr. Alford shortly after.

“I was passing and heard your piano” he said. “You haven’t stopped?”

She explained that Aunt Sally had gone to bed, and he sat formally and talked to her in his cultured pedantic voice on cold and erudite subjectsfor two hours. Then he departed and she stood in the door and watched him down the drive. The moon stood in the sky; along the drive cedars in a grave descending curve were pointed inkyandmotionless on the pale, faintly spangled sky, and upon the unstirring silver air the thin stringent odor of them lay like an exhalation.

She returned to the living room and got her book and turned out the lights and mounted tie stairs. Across the corridor Aunt Sally snored with genteel placidity, and Narcissa stood for a moment, listening to the homely noise. I will be glad when Horry gets home, she thought going on.

She turned on her light and undressed and took her book to bed, where she again held her consciousness deliberately submerged as you hold a puppy under water until its body ceases to resist And after a time her mind surrendered wholly to the book and she read on, pausing to think warmly of sleep, reading a page more. And so when tie negroes first blended their instruments beneath her window, she paid them only the most perfunctory notice. Why in the world are those jelly-beans serenading me? she thought with faint amusement, visioning immediately Aunt Sally In her night-cap leaning from a window and shouting them away.

But in the midst of this amusing picture she satbolt upright, with a sharp and utter certainty; then she rose and entered the adjoining room and looked out the window.

The negroes were grouped on the lawn, in the moonlight: the frosted clarinet, the guitar, the grave comic bulk of the viol. At the street entrance to the drive a motor car loomed in shadow, whose and occupied by whom she could not discern. The musicians played once, then they retreated across the lawn and down the drive, and presently the car drove on, without lights. It was he: no one else would play one tune beneath a lady’s midnight window, just enough to waken her from sleep, then go away.

She returned to her room. The book lay face downward on the bed. But the labor was undone again, and she stood for a while at her window, between the parted curtains, looking out upon the black and silver world and the peaceful night. The air moved upon her face and amid the fallen dark wings of her hair with grave coolness, but inwardly...“The beast, the beast,” she whispered to herself. She let the curtains fall and on her silent feet she descended the stairs again and sought the telephone in the darkness. She miffled its bell with her fingers when she rang.

Miss Jenny’s voice came out of the night with its usual brisk and cold asperity, and without surprise or curiosity. No, he had not returned home, for he was now safely locked up in jail, she believed, unless the city officers were too corrupted to obey a lady’s request. Serenading? Fiddlesticks. What would he want to go serenading for? he couldn’t injure himself serenading, unless someone killed him with a flat iron or an alarm clock. And why was she concerned about him?

Narcissa hung up, and for a moment she stood in the darkness, beating her fists on the telephone’s unresponsive box. The beast, the beast.

She had received three callers that night One came formally and with intent; the second came informally and without any particular effort to remain anonymous or otherwise; the third came anonymously and with calculated intent The garage which sheltered her car was a small brick building surrounded by evergreens. One side of it was a continuation of the garden wall. Beyond the wall a grass-grown lane led back to another street The garage was about fifteen yards from the house and its roof rose to the level of the second story of the house. Narcissa’s bedroom windows looked out upon the slate roof of it.

This third caller entered by the lane and mounted onto the wall and thence onto the garage roof, where he now lay in the shadow of a cedar branching above it, sheltered so from the moon. He had lain there for a long time. The room facing him was dark when he arrived, but he had Iain in his fastness quiet as an animal and with an animal’s patience, without movement save to occasionally raise his head and reconnoiter the immediate scene with covert dartings of hiseyes.

But the room facing him remained dark after the first hour had passed. In the meantime a car entered the drive (he recognized it; he knew every car in town) and a man entered the house. The second hour passed and the room was still dark and still the car stood in the drive. Then the man emerged again and drove away, and a moment later the window facing him glowed suddenly and beyond the sheer curtains her figure moved across his vision. He watched her move about the room beyond the gauzy veil of the curtains, watched the shadowy motions of her disrobing. Then she passed out of his vision- But the light still burned and he lay with a still and infinite patience, lay so while another hour passed and another car stopped in the street and three men carrying an awkwardly shaped burden came up the drive and stepped into the moonlight beneath her window and stopped there; lay so until they played their music and went away again. When they had gone she came to the window and parted the curtains and stood for a while in the dark fallen wings of her hair, looking directly into his hidden eyes.

Then the curtains fell again, and once more she was a shadowy movement beyond them. Then the light went off, and he lay face down on the steep pitch of the garage roof, utterly motionless for a long time, darting from beneath his hidden face covert ceaseless glances, quick and darting and all-embracing as those of an animal.

To Narcissa’s house they came finally. They had visited the dark homes of all the other unmarried girls one by one and sat in the car while the negroes stood on the lawn with their blended instruments. Heads had appeared at darkened windows, sometimes lights went up; once they were invited in, but Hub and Mitch hung diffidently back, once refreshment was sent out to them, once they were heartily cursed by a young man who happened to be sitting with the young lady on the dark veranda. In the meantime they had lost the breather cap, and as they moved from house to house all six of them drank fraternally from the jug, turn and turn about. At last theyreached the Benbows’ and the negroes crossed the lawn and played beneath the cedars. There was a light yet in one window, but none came to it.

The moon stood far down the sky. Its light was now a sourceless silver upon things, spent and a little coldly-wearied, and the world was empty for them as they rolled without lights along a street lifeless and fixed in black-and-silver as any street in the moon itself. Beneath stippled intermittent shadows they passed, crossed quiet intersections of streets dissolving away, occasionally a car motionless at the curb before a house. A dog crossed the street ahead of them trotting, and went on across a lawn and so from sight, intently but without haste, but saving this there was no movement anywhere. The square opened spaciously about the absinthe-cloudy mass of elms that framed the courthouse. Among them the round spaced globes were more like huge pallid grapes than ever. Above the exposed vault in each of the banks burned a single bulb; inside the hotel lobby, before which a few cars were aligned with their rears outward, another burned with a hushed glow. Other lights there were none.

They circled the courthouse, and a shadow moved near the hotel door and detached itself from shadow and came to the curb and stood there, its white shirt glinting dully between the lax wings of dark coat, and as the slow car swung away toward another street, the man hailed them* Bayard slowed and stopped and the man came through the blanched dust and laid his hand on the door.

“Hi, Buck,” Mitch said. “You’re up pretty late, ain’tyou?”

The man had a sober, good-natured horse’s face and he wore a metal star on his unbuttoned waistcoat. His coat humped slightly on his hip.

“What you boys doin’?” he asked “Been to a dance?”

“Havinga little party,” Bayard answered “Want a drink, Buck?”

“No, much obliged.”He stood with his hand on the door, gravely and good-naturedly serious. “Ain’t you fellers out kind of late, yourselves?”

“It is getting’ on,” Mitch agreed. The marshal lifted his foot to the running board. Beneath his hat his eyeswere in shadow. “We’re going in now” Mitch said. The other mused quietly, and Bayard added:

“Sure; we’re on our way home now.”

The officer stood quietly for a moment Then he moved his head slightly and spoke to the negroes.

“Ireckon you boys are about ready to turn in, ain’t you?”

“Yes, suh,” the negroes answered in chorus, and they got out and lifted the bass viol out Bayard gave Reno a bill and they thanked him: and picked up the viol and departed quietly down a side street. The officer paid them no further heed.

“Ain’t that yo’ car in front of Rogers’café, Mitch?” he asked.

“I reckon so. That’s where I left it.”

“Well, suppose you run Hub out home, lessen he’s goin’ to stay in town tonight. Bayard better come withme.”

“Aw, hell, Buck,” Mitch protested.

“What for?” Bayarddemanded.

“His folks are worried about him,” the other said, addressing Mitch and Hub. “They ain’t seen hide nor hair of him since that stallion fell with him. Where’s yo’bandage, Bayard?”

“Took it off,” he answered shortly. “See here, Buck, we’re going to put Mitch out and then Hub and me are going straight home.”

“You been on yo’ way home ever since fo’o’clock, Bayard,” the officer replied soberly, “but you don’t seem to git no nearer there. I reckon you better come with me tonight, like yo’ aunt said.”

“Did Aunt Jenny tell you to arrest me?”

“They was worried about you, son. Miss Jenny just ‘phoned and asked me to kind of see if you was all right until mawnin’. So I reckon we better. You ought to went on home this evenin’.”

“Aw, have a heart, Buck,” Mitch repeated.

“I rather make Bayard mad than Miss Jenny,” the other answered patiently. “You boys go on, and Bayard better come with me.”

Mitch and Hub got out and Hub lifted out his jug and they said goodnight and crossed the square to where Mitch’s Ford stood before the restaurant The marshal got in beside Bayard, and he drove on. The jail was not far. It loomed presently above its walled court, square and implacable, its slitted upper windows brutal as sabre blows. They turned into an alley and the marshal got out and opened a gate. Bayard drove into the grassless littered court and stopped while the other crossed the yard to a small garage in which stood a Ford car. He backed this out and motioned Bayard forward. The garage was built to the Ford’s dimensions, and when the nose of Bayard’s long car touched the back wall, a good quarter of it was still out of doors.

“Better’n nothing though,” the marshal said.“Come on.” They entered through the kitchen, into the jailkeeper’s living quarters, and Bayard stood in a dark passage while the other fumbled with hushed sounds ahead of him. Then a light came on, and they entered a bleak neat room, with spare conglomerate furniture and a few articles of masculine apparel about.

“Say,” Bayard objected, “aren’t you giving me your bed?”

“Won’t need it befo’ mawnin’,” the other answered.“You’ll be gone, then. Want me to he’p you off with yo’dothes?”

“No. I’m all right.” Then, more graciously“Goodnight, Buck, and much obliged.”

“Goodnight,” the marshal answered. He closed the door behind him and Bayard removed his coat and shoes and his tie and snapped the light off and lay on the bed. Moonlight seeped into the room impalpably, refracted and sourceless the night was without any sound. Beyond the window a cornice rose in successive shallow steps; beyond that the sky was opaline and dimensionless. His head was dear and col A The whisky he had drunk was completely dead. Or rather, it was as though his head were one Bayard who watched curiously and impersonally that other Bayard who lay in a strange bed and whose alcohol-dulled nerves radiated like threads of ice through that body which he must drag forever about a bleak and barren world with him. “Hell,” he said, lying on his back, staring out the window where nothing was to be seen, waiting for sleep, not knowing if it would come or not, not caring a particular damn either way. Nothing to be seen, and the long long span of a man’s natural life. Three score and ten years, to drag a stubborn body about the world and cozen its insistent demands. Three score and ten, the Bible said. Seventy years. And hie was only twenty-six. Not much more than a third through it. Hell.

THREE

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He goes with him.”

“What? OldBayard in amotor car?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Horace!”

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

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

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

At supper Aunt Sally broke into his staccato babbling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am glad you’re home, Horry.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes...That’s what I mean.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outward, above and beyond buildings peaceful and gray and old, within and beyond trees in an untarnished and gracious resurgence of green, afternoon was like a blonde woman going slowly in awindless garden; afternoon and June were likeblonde sisters in a windless garden—close, approachingwithout regret the fall of day. Walking a littleslower, perhaps; perhaps looking backward, butwithout sadness, untroubled as cows. Horace sat inthe window while the servant methodically reducedthe chaps of his possessions to the boxes and bags,gazing out across ancient gray roofs, and trees whichhe had seen in all their seasonal moods, in all moodsmatching his own. Had he been younger he wouldhave said goodbye to them secretively or defiantly;older, he would have felt neither the desire to northe impulse to suppress it. So he sat quietly in hiswindow for the last time while the curtains stirreddelicately against his hair, brooding upon theirdreaming vistas where twilight was slowly finding itself and where, beyond dissolving spires, lingeredgrave evening shapes; and he knew a place where,had he felt like walking, he could hear a cuckoo, thatsymbol of sweet and timeless mischief, that augur of

the fever renewed again.

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

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

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

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

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t be silly,” Belle said.

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

“She’s somewhere around, I suppose,” Belle agreedindifferently. “You haven’t had your hair cut yet,”she stated. “Why is it that men have no sense aboutbarbers?” she addressed the other two. The olderwoman watched them brightly, coldly across hertwo flaccid chins. The young girl sat quietly in hersimple virginal white, her racket on her lap and onebrown hand lying upon it like a sleeping tan puppy.She was watching Horace with sober interest butwithout rudeness, as children do. ‘They either won’tgo to the barber at all, or they insist on having their

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What was it?” Horace persisted.

“Sir?”

“What you started to say just then.”

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

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

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

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

“Horace,” Belle said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, Titania?” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you find a place?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come in, Titania,” Horace said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you going to stay for supper?”

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

4

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

But now the guests stood, and drifted and chattered, anticipatory and unceasing, and every minuteor two Harry gravitated again to the diningroom,on the table of which his daughter’s gifts and flowerswere arrayed and beside which little Belle in her palelilac dress stood in a shining-eyed and breathless ecstasy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” little Belle agreed breathlessly.

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

“Yes, sir,” little Belle piped obediently.

Belle rose, swishing again. “Come on, sister. It’stime to begin. And don’t forget and start pulling atyour clothes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think they both were,” he answered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Isit true?” she asked after a time.

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

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

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

“Narcy—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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