Flags in the Dust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He mounted the bank and got the sapling from the wagon bed and returned and joined his father wherethe other stood in sober, curious disapproval aboveBayard’s legs, and with the pole they lifted the carenough to drag Bayard free of it. They lifted himonto the shelving bank and he sprawled there in thesun, with his calm face and his matted hair, while water drained out of his boots, and they stood abovehim on alternate legs while they wrung out theiroveralls.

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

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

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

“Tell ‘urn you holp me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Got a cigarette?” he asked,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No. Gimme another drink.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bayard lay white and still and a little sheepish in his bed. Old Bayard and the doctor were just leaving, and Miss Jenny waited until they were out of the room, then she raged and stormed at him and stroked his face and. his hair, while Simon bobbed and mowed in the corner between bed and wall. “Dasso, Miss Jenny, dasso! I kep’ a-tellin’‘im!”

And so, having eased her soul, she descended to . the veranda where Dr. Alford stood in impeccable departure. Old Bayard sat in the car waiting for him, and on Miss Jenny’s appearance he became his stiff self again and completed his departure, and he and old Bayard drove away.

Miss Jenny also looked up and down the. veranda, then into the hall. “Where—” she said, then she called: “Narcissa.” A reply; and she added: “Where are you?” The reply came again and Miss Jenny reentered the house and saw Narcissa’s white dress inthe gloom where she sat on the piano bench. “He’s awake,” Miss Jenny said. “You can come up and see him.” The other rose and turned into the light. “Why, what’s the matter? You look lots worse than he does. You’re white as a sheet.”

“Nothing,” Narcissa answered. “I—” She stared at Miss Jenny a moment, clenching her hands at her sides. “I must go,” she said, and she emerged from the parlor. “It’s late, and Horace…”

“You can come in and speak to him, can’t you?” Miss Jenny asked, watching the other curiously. “There’s not any blood, if that’s what you are afraid of.”

“It isn’t that,”‘ Narcissa answered. “I’m not afraid.” But she was rigid with repressed trembling; Miss Jenny could see her teeth clenched upon her lower lip.

“Why, all right,” Miss Jenny agreed kindly, “if you’d rather not. I just thought perhaps you’d like to see he is all right, as long as you are here. But don’t if you don’t feel like it.”

“Yes. Yes. I feel like it. I want to.” She passed Miss Jenny and went on down the hall. At the foot of the stairs she halted until Miss Jenny came up behind her, and they mounted together, although she kept a step ahead and with her face averted from Miss Jenny’s probing eyes.

‘What’s the matter?” Miss Jenny demanded, still watching the other. “What happened to you? Have you fallen in love with him?”

“In love...him? Bayard?” She swayed “against the rail beside her and paused, and slid her hand along the rail and drew herself onward. She began to laugh thinly, repressing hysteria. Miss Jenny mounted beside her, piercing and curious and cold; Narcissa hurried on. At the stair head she stoppedagain, holding to the railing, and permitted Miss Jenny to precede her; and just without the door to Bayard’s room she stopped yet again and leaned against it, throttling her laughter and her trembling. Then she entered the room, where Miss Jenny stood beside the bed with head reverted.

For a moment she could see nothing for the. swelling convolutions of laughter in her throat, and she was conscious only of her need to repress them and of a sickly-sweet lingering of ether as she approached the bed and stood blindly beside it, with her hidden writhing hands. On the pillow Bayard’s head lay as she had remembered it on that former day—pallid and calm, like a chiseled mask brushed lightly over with the shadow of his spent violence. He was watching her, and for a while she gazed at him, and Miss Jenny and the room and all, swam away.

“You beast, you beast,” she said thinly. “Why must you always do these things where I’ve got to see you?”

“I didn’t know you were there,” Bayard answered weakly, with mild astonishment.

But this was gone soon; nor did it return. Every few days, by Miss Jenny’s request, she came out and sat beside his bed and read to him, bringing into the room her outward untroubled serenity. He cared nothing at all about books; it is doubtful if he had ever read a book on his own initiative; but he would lie motionless in his cast while her grave contralto voice went on and on in the drowsy room. Sometimes he tried to talk to her, but she ignored his attempts and read on; if he persisted, she went away and left him. So he soon learned to lie, usually with his eyes closed, voyaging alone in the bleak and barren regions of his despair, while her voice flowed and ebbed above the remoter sounds that surrounded them—Miss Jenny scolding Simon or Isom downstairs or in the garden; the twittering of birds in the tree just beyond the window; the ceaseless rhythmic monotone of the water pump below the barn. At times she would cease and look at him and find that he was peacefully sleeping.

6

Old man Falls came through the lush green of early June, came into town through the yet horizontal sunlight of morning, and in his dusty neat overalls he now sat opposite old Bayard in immaculate linen and a geranium like a merry wound. The room was cool and still, reposeful with dingy light and the casual dust of a negro janitor’s casual and infrequent disturbing. Now that old Bayard was aging, and what with the deaf tenor of his stiffening ways, he was showing more and more a desire to surround himself with things of a like undeference; showing an incredible aptitude for choosing servants who circled about him in a sort of pottering and bland futility. The janitor, who dubbed old Bayard General and whom old Bayard and the other clients for whom he performed seemingly interminable duties of a slovenly and minor nature, addressed as Dr. Jones, was one of these. He was black and stooped with querulousness and age, and he took advantage of everyone who would permit him, and old Bayard swore at him’ constantly and permitted him to steal his tobacco and the bank’s winter supply of coal and peddle it to other negroes. The windows behind which old Bayard and hiscaller sat gave upon a vacant lot of rubbish and dusty weeds. It was bounded by the weathered rears of sundry one-story board buildings within which small businesses—repair and junk shops and such—had their lowly and ofttimes anonymous being. The lot itself was used by day by country people as a depot for their wagons and teams; already some of these were tethered somnolent and ruminant there, and about the stale ammoniac droppings of their patient generations sparrows swirled in garrulous clouds, or pigeons slanted with sounds like rusty shutters, or strode and preened in burnished and predatory pomposity, crooning among themselves with guttural un-emphasis.

Old man Falls sat on the opposite side of the trash-filled fireplace, mopping his face with a blue-figured bandana.

‘It’s my damned old legs,” he explained, faintly apologetic. “Use to be I’d walk twelve-fifteen mile to a picnic or a singin’ with less study than that ‘ere little old three mile into town gives me now.” He mopped the handkerchief about that face of his, browned and cheerful these many years with the ample and abounding earth. “Looks like they’re fixin’ to give out on me, and I ain’t but ninety-three, neither.” He held his parcel in his other hand, but he continued to mop his face, making no motion to open it nor to ascertain its contents.

“Why didn’t you wait on the roadside until a wagon came along?” old Bayard demanded in that overloud tone of the deaf. “Always some damn feller with a field full of weeds coming to town.”

“I reckon I mought,” the other agreed. “But gittin’ here so quick would spile my holiday. I ain’t like you town-folks. I ain’t got so much time I kin hurry it.” He stowed the handkerchief away and rose and laidhis parcel carefully on the mantel, and from his shirt he produced a small object wrapped in a clean frayed rag. Beneath his tedious and unhurried fingers there emerged a tin snuff-box polished long since to the dull soft sheen of satin or silver by handling and age. Old Bayard sat in his white linen and watched, watched him quietly as he removed the cap of the box and laid this, too, carefully aside.

“Now, turn yo’ face to the light,” old man Falls directed.

“Loosh Peabody says that stuff will give me blood poisoning, Will.”

The other continued his slow preparations, his blue innocent eyes steadily following the movement of his hands. “Loosh Peabody never said that,” he corrected quietly. “One of them young doctors told you that, Bayard. Lean yo’ face to the light.” But old Bayard sat yetwell back in his chair, his hands on the arms of it, watching the other with his piercing old eyes soberly, a little wistful; eyes filled with un-nameable things like the eyes of old lions, and intent.

Old man Falls poised a dark gob of his ointment on one finger and raised his head. Then he set the box carefully on his vacated chair and he put his hand on old Bayard’s face, put old Bayard still resisted, though passively, watching him with his unutterable things; and the other drew him firmly but gently nearer the light.

“Come on, here. I’m too old to waste any time hurtin’ folks. Hold still, now, so’ I won’t spot yo’ face. My hand ain’t steady enough to lift a rifle ball offen a hot stove no mo’.”

He submitted then, and old man Falls patted the salve onto the wen with small deft touches. Then he took up the bit of cloth and removed the surplus from the wen and wiped his fingers and dropped therag onto the hearth and knelt stiffly and touched a match to it. “We allus do that,” he explained. “My granny got that ‘ere from a Choctaw woman nigh a hundred year ago. Ain’t none of us never told what hit air nor left no after trace.” He rose stiffly again and dusted his knees. He recapped the box with the same unhurried laborious care and put it away and raised his parcel from the mantel and resumed his chair.

“Hit’ll turn black, and long’s hit’s black, hit’s workin’. Don’t put no water on yo’ face befo’ mawnin’, andI’ll come in again in ten days and dose hit again, and on the—” He brooded a moment, computing slowly on his gnarled fingers; his lips movedbut with no sound. “—ninth day of July, hit’ll drop off. And don’t you let Miss Jenny nor none of them doctors worry you about it.”

He sat with his over ailed knees close together. The package lay on his knees and he now opened it after the ancient laborious ritual, picking with a sort of patient indomitability at the pink knot of the cord until a younger person would have screamed Old Bayard merely lit a cigar and propped his feet on the fireplace, and in good time old man Falls solved the knot and removed the string and laid it across his chair-arm. It fell to the floor and lie bent and fumbled it into his blunt fingers and laid it again across the chair-arm and watched it a while lest it fall again, then he opened the parcel First was his carton of tobacco, and he removed a plug and sniffed it, turned it about in his hand and sniffed it again. But without biting into it he laid it and its fellows aside and delved further yet lie spread open the throat of the resulting paper bag, and his innocent boy’s eyes gloated soberly into it.

“I’ll declare,” he said. “Sometimes I’m rightashamed for havin’ sech a consarned sweet tooth. Hit don’t give me no rest a-tall.” Still carefully guarding the other objects on his close knees he tilted the sack and shook two or three of the striped, shrimp-like things into his palm, returned all but one, which he put into his mouth. “I’m afeard now I’ll be loosin’ my teeth someday and I’ll have to start gummin’‘em or eatin’ soft ones. I never did relish soft candy.” His leathery cheek bulged slightly, with slow regularity like a respiration as he chewed against the hard substance. He peered into the sack again, and he sat weighing it in his hand.

“They was times back in sixty-three and -fo’ whena feller could a bought a section of land and a niggerwith this yere bag of candy. Lots of times I mind,with everything goin’ agin us like, and sugar andcawfee gone and food scace, eatin’ stole cawn whenthey was any to steal and ditch weeds ef they wa’nt;bivouacin’ at night in the rain, more’n like...” Hisvoice trailed away among ancient phantoms of thesoul’s and the body’s tribulations, into those regionsof glamqrous and useless endeavor where such ghostsabide. Then he chuckled and chewed his peppermintagain.

“I mind that day we was a-dodgin’ around Grant’s army, headin’ nawth. Grant was at Grenada then, and Colonel had rousted us boys out and we taken hoss and jined Van Dorn’s cavalry down that-a-way. That was when Colonel had that ‘ere silver stallion. Grant was still at Grenada, but Van Dora lit out one day, headin’ nawth; why, us boys didn’t know. Colonel mought have knowed, but he never told us. Not that we keered much, long’s we was headin’ to’ds home.

“So our comp’ny was ridin’ along to ourselves, goin’ to jine up with the balance of ‘em later. Leastways the rest of ‘em thought we was goin’ to jine ‘em. But Colonel never had no idea of doin’ that; his cawn hadn’t been laid by yit, and he was goin’ home fer a spell. We wasn’t runnin’ away,” he explained. “We knowed Van Dorn could handle ‘em all right fer a week or two. He usually done it. He was a putty good man,” old man Falls said. “A putty good man.’’

“They were all pretty good men in those days,” old Bayard agreed. “But you damn fellers quit fighting and went home too often.”

“Well,” old man Falls replied defensively, “even ef the hull country’s overrun with bears, a feller can’t hunt bears all the time. He’s got to quit once in a while, ef hit’s only to feed and rest up the dogs and hosses. But I reckon them dogs and bosses could stay on the trail long as any. ‘Course everybody couldn’tkeep up with that ‘ere mist-colored stallion. They wa’nt but one animal in the Confedrit army could tech him—that last hoss Zeb Fothergill fotch back outen one of Sherman’s cavalry pickets on his last trip into Tennessee.

“Nobody never did know what Zeb done on them trips of his’n; Colonel claimed hit was jest to steal hosses. But he never got back with lessen one. One time he come back with seven of the orneriest critters that ever walked, I reckon. He tried to swap ‘em fer meat and cawn-meal, but wouldn’t nobody have ‘em; then he tried to give ‘em to the army, but even the army wouldn’t have ‘em. So he finally turned ‘em loose and requisitioned to Joe Johnston’s haidquarters fer ten hosses sold to Forrest’s cavalry. I don’t know ef he ever got an answer. Nate, Forrest wouldn’t a had them hosses. I doubt ef they’d even a et ‘em in Vicksburg...I never did put no big reliability in Zeb Fothergill, him comin’ and goin’ by hisself likehe done. But he knowed hosses, and he usually fotch a good ‘un home ever’ time he went away to’ds the war. But he never got another’n like this befo’.”

The bulge receded from his cheek and he produced his pocket knife and cut a neat segment from his plug of tobacco and put it in his mouth. Then he rewrapped his parcel and tied the string about it again. The ash of old Bayard’s cigar trembled delicately about its glowing heart, but did not fall; his crossed elastic-sided boots gleamed against the hearth edge.

Old man Falls spat neatly and brownly into the cold fireplace. “That day we was in Calhoun county,” he continued. “Hit was as putty a summer mawnin’ as you ever see; men and hosses rested and fed and feelin’ peart, trottin’ along the road through the woods and fields whar birds was a-singin’ and young rabbits lopin’ across the road. Colonel and Zeb was ridin’ along side by side on them two hosses, Colonel on Jupiter and Zeb on that sorrel two-year-old, and they was a-braggin’ as usual. We all knowed Colonel’s Jupiter, but Zeb kep’ a-contendin’ he wouldn’t take no man’s dust. The road was putty straight across the bottom to’ds the river and Zeb kep’ on aggin’ the Colonel fer a race, until Colonel said All right. He told us boys to come on and him and Zeb would wait fer us at the river bridge ‘bout fo’ mile ahead, and him and Zeb lit out.

“Them hosses was the puttiest livin’ things I ever seen. They went off together like two birds, neck and neck. They was outen sight in no time, with dust swirlin’ behind, but we could foller ‘em fer a ways by the dust they left, watchin’ it kind of suckin’ on down the road like one of these here ottomobiles was in the middle of it. When they come to whar the road drapped down to the river Colonel had Zeb beatby about three hundred yards. Thar was a crick jest under the ridge, and when Colonel sailed over the rise and come in sight of the crick, thar was a comp’ny of Yankee cavalry with their hosses picketed and their muskets stacked, eatin’ dinner by the bridge. Colonel says they was a-settin’thar gapin’ at the rise when he come over hit, holdin’ cupsofcaw-fee and hunks of bread in their hands and their muskets stacked abo’ forty foot away buggin’ their eyes and mouths at him.

“It was too late fer him to turn back, anyhow, but I don’t reckon he would ef they’d been time. He jest spurred down the ridge and in amongst ‘em, scatterin’ cook-fires and guns and men, shoutin’‘Surround ‘em, boys! Ef you move, you are dead men.’ One or two of ‘em made to break away, but Colonel drawed his pistols and let ‘em off, and they come back and scrouged in amongst the others, and thar they set’still a-holdin’ their cups and dinner, when Zeb come up. And that was the way we found ‘em when we got thar ten minutes later.” Old man Falls spat again, neatly and brownly, and he chuckled. His eyesshone like periwinkles, “That cawfeewas sho’ mighty fine,” he said.

“And thar we was, with a passel of prisoners we didn’t have no use fer. We held ‘em all that day and et their grub; and when night come we taken and throwed their muskets into the crick and taken their ammunition and the rest of the grub and put a guard on their hosses, then the rest of us laid down. And all that night we laid thar in them fine Yankee blankets, listenin’ to them prisoners sneakin’ away one at a time, slippin’ down the bank into the crick and wadin’ off. Time to time one would slip or make a splash ersomething, then they’d all git right still fer a spell. But pretty soon we’d hear ‘em at it again,crawlin’ through the bushes to’ds the crick, and us layin’ with blanket aidges held to our mouths. Hit was nigh dawn‘fore the last one had snuck off in a way that suited him.

“Then Colonel from whar he was a-layin’ let out a yell them pore critters could hear fer a mile.

“‘Go it Yank,’ he says, ‘and look out fer moccasins!’ ”

“Next mawnin’ we saddled up and loaded our plunder and ever’ man taken him a hoss, and lit out fer home. We’d been home two weeks and Colonel had his cawn laid by, when we heard ‘bout Van Dorn ridin’ into Holly Springs and burnin’ Grants sto’s. Seems like he never needed no help from us, noways.” He chewed his tobacco for a time, quietly retrospective, reliving in the company of men now dust with the dust for which they had, unwittingly perhaps, fought, those gallant, pinch-bellied days into which few who now trod that earth and. drew breath, could enter into with him.

Old Bayard shook the ash from his cigar. “Will,” he said, “what the devil were you folks fighting about, anyhow?”

“Bayard,” old man Falls answered, “damned ef I ever did know.”

After old man Falls had departed with his small parcel and his innocently bulging cheek, old Bayard sat and smoked his cigar. He knew now a sense of finality, of peace; like that of the man who has made his final cast with the dice and from whom all initiative is lifted, leaving him no more than a vegetable until they cease rolling, let them show what they may. He had crossed the Rubicon...but had he? He raised his hand and touched the wen again, but lightly, recalling old man Falls’ parting stricture; and recalling this, the thought that it might not yet be too late, that he might yet remove the paste with water, followed.

He rose and crossed to the lavatory in the corner of the room. Above it was fixed a small cabinet with a mirror in the door, and in it he examined the black spot on his face, touching it again with his fingers, then staring at his hand. Yes, it might still come off...But be damned if he would; be damned to a man who didn’t know his own mind. And Will Falls, too; Will Falls, hale and sane and sound asa dollar; Will Falls who, as he himself had said, was too old to have any reason for injuring anyone. He flung his cigar away and quitted the room and tramped through the lobby toward the door where his chair sat. But before he reached the door he stopped and turned and came up to the teller’s window, behind which the cashier sat in a green eyeshade.

“Res,” he said.

The cashier looked up. “Yes, Colonel?”

“Who is that damn boy that hangs around here, looking through that window all the time?” old Bayard demanded, lowering his voice within a pitch or so of an ordinary conversational tone.

“What boy, Colonel?” Old Bayard pointed, and the cashier raised himself on his stool and peered over the partition and saw without the indicated window a boy of ten or twelve watching him with an innocently casual air. “Oh. That’s Will Beard’s boy, from up at the boarding house,” he shouted. “Friend of Byron’s, I think.”

“What’s he doing, then? Every time I walk through here, there he is looking in that window. What does he want?”

“Maybe he’s a bank robber,” the cashier suggested.

“What?” Old Bayard cupped his ear fiercely in his palm.

“Maybe he’s a bank robber,” the other shouted, leaning forward on his stool. Old Bayard snorted and tramped violently away and slammed his chair back against the door. The cashier sat lumped and shapeless on his stool, rumbling deep within his gross body. He said, without turning his head: “Colonel’s let Will Falls treat that thing on his face with that salve.” The Snopes at his desk made no reply; did not raise his head. After a time the boy moved, and drifted casually and innocently away.

Virgil Beard now possessed, besides the air rifle, a pistol that projected a stream of ammoniac water excruciatingly painful to the eyes, a small magic lantern, and an ex-candy showcase in which he kept birds’ eggs and an assortment of insects that had died slowly on pins, and a modest hoard of nickels and dimes and quarters. With a child’s innocent pleasure he divulged to his parents the source of this beneficence, and his mother took Snopes to her gray heart, fixing him special dishes and performing trifling acts to increase his creature comfort with bleak and awkward gratitude.

At times the boy, already dressed and with his bland shining face, would enter his room and waken him from his troubled sleep and sit on a chair while Snopes donned his clothing, talking politely and vaguely of certain things he aimed to do, and of what he would require to do them successfully with. Or if not this, he was on hand at breakfast while his harried gray mother and the slatternly negress bore dishes back and forth from the kitchen, quiet but proprietorial; blandly and innocently portentous.

And all during the banking day (it was summer now, and school was out) Snopes never knew when he would look over his shoulder and find the boy lounging without the plate glass window of the bank; watching him with profound and static patience. Presently he would take himself away, and for a short time Snopes would be able to forget him until, wrapped in his mad unsleeping dream, he mounted the boarding house veranda at supper time and found the boy sitting there and waiting patiently his return; innocent and bland, steadfast and unassertive as a minor but chronic disease. “Got another business letter to write tonight, Mr. Snopes?”

And sometimes after he had gone to bed and his light was out; he lay in the mad darkness against his sleepless desire moiled in obscene images and shapes, and heard presently outside his door secret, rat-like sounds; and lay so tense in the dark, expecting the door to open and, preceded by breathing above him sourceless and invisible: “Going to write another letter, Mr. Snopes?” And he waked sweating from dreams in which her image lived and moved and thwarted and mocked him, with the pillow crushed against his mean, half-insane face, while the words produced themselves in his ears: “Got air other letter to write yet, Mr. Snopes?”

So he changed his boarding house. He gave Mrs. Beard an awkward, stumbling explanation; vague, composed of sentences with frayed ends. She was sorry to see him go, but she permitted him to pack his meagre belongings and depart without dither anger or complaint, as is the way of country people. He went to live with a relation, that I. O. Snopes who ran the restaurant—a nimble, wiry little man with a talkative face like a nutcracker, and false merry eyes—in a small frame house painted a sultryprodigious yellow, near the railway station. Snopeses did not trust one another enough to develop any intimate relations, and he was permitted to go and come when he pleased. So he found this better than the boarding house, the single deterrent to complete satisfaction being the hulking but catlike presence of I.O.’s son Clarence. But, what with his secretive nature, it had even been his custom to keep all his possessions under lock and key, so this was but a minor matter. Mrs. Snopes was a placid mountain of a woman who swung all day in a faded wrapper, in the porch swing. Not reading, not doing anything: just swinging.

He liked it here. It was more private; no transients appearing at the supper table and tramping up and down the hallways all night; no one to try to engage him in conversation on the veranda after supper. Now, after supper he could sit undisturbed on the tight barren little porch in the growing twilight and watch the motor cars congregating at the station across the way to meet the 7:30 train; could watch the train draw into the station with its rows of lighted windows and the hissing plume from the locomotive, and go on again with bells, trailing its diminishing sound into the distant evening, while he sat on the dark porch with his desperate sleepless lust and his fear. Thus, until one evening after supper he stepped through the front door and found Virgil Beard sitting patiently and blandly on the front steps in the twilight.

So he had been run to earth again, and drawn, and hounded again into flight. Yet outwardly he pursued the even tenor of his days, unchanged, performing his duties with his slow meticulous care. But within him smoldered something of which he himself grew afraid, and at times he found himself gazing at hisidle hands on the desk before him as though they were not his hands, wondering dully at them and at what they were- capable, nay importunate, to do. And day by day that lust and fear and despair that moiled within him merged, becoming desperation—a thing blind and vicious and hopeless, like that of a Cornered rat. And always, if he but raised his head and looked toward the window, there was the boy watching him with bland and innocent eye? beneath the pale straw of his hair. Sometimes he blinked; then the boy was gone; sometimes not. So he could never tell whether the face had been there at all, or whether it was merely another face swum momentarily from out the seething of his mind. In the meanwhile he wrote another letter.

7

Miss Jenny’s exasperation and rage when old Bayard arrived that afternoon was unbounded. “You stubborn old fool,” she stormed. “Can’t Bayard kill you fast enough, that you’ve got to let that old quack of a Will Falls give you blood poisoning? After what Dr. Alford told you, when even Loosh Peabody, who thinks- a course of quinine or calomel will cure anything from a broken neck to chilblains, agreed with him? I’ll declare, sometimes I just lose all patience with you folks; wonder what crime I seem to be expiating by having to live with you. Soon as Bayard sort of quiets down and I can quit jumping every time the ‘phone rings, you have to go and let that old pauper daub your face up with axle grease and lamp black. I’m a good mind to pack up and get out, and start life over again in some place where they never heard of a Sartoris.” She raged andstormed on; old Bayard raged in reply, with violent words and profane, and their voices swelled and surged through the house until Simon and Elnora in the kitchen moved about with furtive hushed sounds. Finally old Bayard tramped from the house and mounted his horse and rode away, leaving Miss Jenny to wear her rage out upon the empty air, and then therewas peace for a time.

But at supper the storm brewed and burst again. Simon within the butler’s pantry could hear them beyond the swing door, and young Bayard’s voice too, trying to shout them down. “Let up, let up,” he howled. “For God’s sake. I can’t hear myself chew.”

“And you’re another one.” Miss Jenny turned promptly on him. “You’re just as trying as he is. You and your stiff-necked, sullen ways. Helling around the country in that car just because you think there may be somebody who cares whether or not you break your worthless neck, and then coming into the supper table smelling like a stable-hand! Just because you went to a war. Do you think nobody else ever went to a war? Do you reckon that when my Bayard came back from The War, he made a nuisance of himself to everybody that had to live with him? But he was a gentleman: he raised the devil like a gentleman, not like you Mississippi country people. Clodhoppers. Look what he did with just a horse,”she added. “He didn’t have any flying machine.”

“Look at the little two-bit warhewent to,” young Bayard rejoined. “A war that was so sorry that grandfather wouldn’t stay up there in Virginia where it was, even.”

“And nobody wanted him at it,” Miss Jenny retorted. “A man that would get mad just because his men deposed him and elected a better colonel in hisplace. Got mad and came back to the country to lead a bunch of brigands.”

“Little two-bit war;,” young Bayard repeated. “And on a horse. Anybody can go to a war on a horse. No chance for him to do anything much.”

“Atleast he got himself decently killed,” Miss Jenny snapped. “He did more with a horse than you could do with that aeroplane.”

“Sho,” Simon breathed against the pantry door. “Ain’t dey gwine it? Takes white folks to sho’‘noughquoil.” And so it surged and ebbed through the succeeding days; wore itself out, then surged again when old Bayard returned home with another application of old man Falls’ paste. But by this time Simon was having troubles of his own, troubles which he finally consulted old Bayard about one afternoon. Young Bayard was laid up in bed with his crushed ribs, with: Miss Jenny mothering him with violent and cherishing affection, and Miss Benbow to visit with him and read aloud to him; and Simon came into his own again. The tophat and the duster came down from the nail, and old Bayard’s cigars depleted daily by one, and the fat matched horses spent their accumulated laziness and insolence between home and the bank, before which Simon swung them to a halt each afternoon as of old, with his clamped cigar and his smartly furled whip and all the theatrics of the fine moment. “De ottomobile,” Simon philosophized, “is all right for pleasure and excitement, but fer de genu-wine gen’lmun tone, dey ain’t but one thing: dat’s hosses.”

Thus Simon’s opportunity came ready to his hand, and once they were clear of town and the team had settled into its gait, he took advantage of it.

“Well, Cunnel,” he began, “looks lak me en you’s got to make some financial ‘rangements.”

“What?” Old Bayard brought his attention back from where it wandered about the familiar landscape of planted fields and blue shining hills beyond them.

“I says, it looks lak me en you’s goin’ ter have to arrange about a little cash money.”

“Much obliged, Simon,” old Bayard answered,“but I don’t need any money right now. I’m muchobliged, though.”

Simon laughed heartily, from the teeth out.“I declare, Cunnel, you sho’ is comical. Rich man lak you needin’ money!” And he laughed again, with unctuous arid abortive heartiness. “Yes, suh, you sho’ is comical.” Then he ceased laughing and became engrossed with the horses for a moment?Twins they were, Roosevelt and Taft, with sleek hides and broad, comfortable hips. “You, Taf’, lean on ‘dat collar! Laziness gwine go in on you someday, and kill you, sho’.” Old Bayard sat watching his apelike head and the swaggering tilt of the tophat. Then Simon turned his wizened, plausible face over his shoulder. “But sho.‘nough, now, we is got to quiet dem niggers somehow”

“What have they done? Can’t they find anybody to take their money?”

“Well, suh, hit’s lak dis,” Simon explained “Hit’s kind of all ‘round cu’i’s. You see, dey been collectin’ buildin’ money fer dat church whut burnt down, and ez dey got de money up, dey turnt hit over to me, whut wid my ‘ficial position on de church boa’d and bein’ I wuz a member of de bes’ fembly ‘round here. Dat ‘uz erbout las’ Chris’mus time, and now dey wants de money back.”

“That’s strange,” old Bayard said.

“Yessuh,” Simon agreed readily. “Hitstruck me jes’ zackly dat way.”

“Well, if they insist, I reckon you’d better give it backto’em.”

“Now you’s gittin’ to it.” Simon turned his head again; his manner was confidential, and he exploded his bombshell in a hushed melodramatic tone: “De money’s gone.”

“Dammit,I know that,” old Bayard answered pettishly. “Where is it?”

“I went and put it out,” Simon told him, and his tone was still confidential, with a little pained astonishment at the world’s obtuseness. “And now dem niggers’cusin’me of stealin’it,”

“Do you mean to tell me that you took charge of money belonging to other people, and then went and loaned it to somebody else?”

“You does de same thing ev’y day,” Simon answered. “Ain’t lendin’ out money yo’ main business?”

Old Bayard snorted violently. “You get that money back and give it to those niggers, or you’ll be in jail, you hear?”

“You talks jes’ lak dem uppity town riggers,” Simon told him. “Dat money done been put out, now,” he reminded his patron.

“Getit back. Haven’t you got collateral for it?”

“Is I got which?”

“Something worth the value of the money, to keepuntil the money is paid back.”

“Yessuh, I got dat” Simon chuckled again, a satyrish chuckle, with smug and complacent innuendo. “Yessuh, I got dat, all right. Only I never heard it called collateral befo’. Naw, suh, not dat.”

“Did you give that money to some nigger wench?” Old Bayard demanded.

‘Well, suh, hit’s lak dis—” Simon began, but the other interrupted him.

“Ah, the devil. And now you expect me to pay it back, do you? How much is it?”

“I don’t rightly remember. Dem niggers claims hit wuz seventy er ninety dollars er somethin’. But don’t you pay ‘um no mind; you jes’ give ‘um whatever you think is right: dey’ll take it.”

“I’m damned if I will. They can take it out of your worthless hide, or send you to jail—whichever they want to, but I’m damned if I’ll pay a cent of it.”

‘‘Now, Cunnel,” Simon said, “you ain’t gwine let dem town niggers ‘cuse a member of yo’ fambly of stealin’,isyou?”

“Drive on!” old Bayard shouted. Simon turned on the seat and clucked to the horses and drove on, his cigar tilted toward his hatbrim, his elbows out and the whip caught smartly back in his hand, glancing now and then at the field niggers laboring among the cotton rows with tolerant and easy scorn.

Old-man Falls replaced the cap on his tin of salve, wiped the tin carefully with the bit of rag, then knelt on the cold hearth and held a match to the rag.

“I reckon them doctors air still a-tellin’ you hit’s gwine to kill you, ain’t they?” he said.

Old Bayard propped his feet against the hearth, cupping a match to his cigar, cupping two tiny matchflames in his eyes. He flung the match away and grunted.

Old man Falls watched the rag take fire sluggishly, with a pungent pencil of yellowish smoke that broke curling in the still air. “Ever’ now and then a feller has to walk up and spit in deestruction’s face, sort of, fer his own good. He has to kind of put a aidge on hisself, like he’d hold his axe to the grindstone,” he said, squatting before the pungent curling of thesmoke as though in a pagan ritual in miniature. “Ef a feller’ll show his face to deestruction ever’ now and then, deestruction’ll leave ‘im be ‘twell his time comes. Deestruction likes to take a feller in the back.”

“What?” old Bayard said

Old man Falls rose and dusted his knees carefully.

“Deestruction’s like ary other coward” he roared. “Hit won’t strike a feller that’s a-lookiln’ hit in the face lessen he pushes hit too clost. Your paw knowed that. Stood in the do’ of that sto’ the day them two cyarpet-baggers brung them niggers in to vote that day in ‘72. Stood thar in his Prince Albert coat and beaver hat, with his arms folded, when everybody else had left, and watched them two Missouri fellers herdin’ them niggers up the road to’ds the sto’; stood right in the middle of the do’ while them two cyarpet-baggers begun backin’ away with their hands in their pockets until they was clar of the niggers, and cussed him. And him standin’ thar jest like this.” He crossed his arms on his breast, his hands in sight, and for a moment old Bayard saw, as through a cloudy glass, that arrogant and familiar shape which the old man in shabby overalls had contrived in some way to immolate and preserve in the vacuum of his own abnegated self .

“Then, when they was gone on back down the road, Cunnel reached around inside the do’ and lifted out the ballot box and sot hit between his feet.

“‘You niggers come hyer to vote, did you?’ he says. ‘All right, come up hyer and vote.’

“When they had broke and scattered he let off that ‘ere dern’ger over their haids a couple of times, then he loaded hit again and marched down the road to Miz Winterbottom’s, whar them two fellers boa’ded.

“‘Madam,’ he says, liftin’ his beaver, ‘I have a smallmatter of business to discuss with yo’lodgers. Permit me,’ he says, and he put his hat back on and marched up the stairs steady as a parade, with Miz Winterbottom gapin’ after him with her mouth open. He walked right into the room whar they was a-settin’ behind a table facin’ the do’ with their pistols layin’ on the table.

“When us boys outside heard the three shots we run in. Thar wuz Miz Winterbottom standin’ thar, a-gapin’ up the stairs, and in a minute hyer comes Cunnel with his hat cocked over his eye, marchin’ down the stairs steady as a co’t jury, breshin’ the front of his coat with his hank’cher. And us standin’ thar, a-watchin’ him. He stopped in front of Miz Wihterbottom and lifted his hat again.

“‘Madam,’ he says, ‘I was fo’ced to muss up yo’ guest room right considerable. Pray accept my apologies, and have yo’ nigger clean it up and send the bill to me. My apologies agin, madam, fer havin’ been put to the necessity of exterminating vermin on yo’ premises. Gentlemen,’ he says to us, ‘good mawnin’. And he cocked that ‘ere beaver on his head and walked out.

“And, Bayard,” old man Falls said, “I sort of envied them two nawthuners, be damned ef I didn’t. A feller kin take a wife and live with her a long time, but after all they ain’t no kin. But the feller that brings you into the world or sends you outen hit...”

Lurking behind the pantry door Simon could hear the steady storming of Miss Jenny’s and old Bayard’s voices; later when they had removed to the office and Elnora and Isom and Caspey sat about the table in the kitchen waiting for Simon, the concussion ofMiss Jenny’s raging and old Bayard’s rock-like stubbornness came in muffled surges, as of faraway surf.

“What dey quoilin, about now?” Caspey asked. “Is you been and done something?” he demanded of his nephew.

Isom rolled his eyes quietly above his steady jaws. “Naw’ suh,” he mumbled. “I ain’t done nothin’.”

“Seems like dey’d git wo’ out, after a while. What’s pappy doin’, Elnora?”

“Up dar in de hall, listenin’. Go tell ‘im to come on and git his supper, so I kin git done, Isom.”

Isom slid from his chair, still chewing, and left the kitchen. The steady raging of the two voices increased; where the shapeless figure of his grandfather stood like a disreputable and ancient bird in the dark hallway Isom could distinguish words:...poison...blood...think you can cat your head off and cure it?...fool put it on your foot, but...face, head...dead and good riddance...fool of you dying because of your own bullheaded folly...you first sitting in a chair, though...

“you and that damn doctor are going to worry me to death.” Old Bayard’s voice drowned the other temporarily. “Will Falls won’thave a chance to kill me. I can’t sit in my chair in town without that damn squirt sidling around me and looking disappointed because I’m still alive on my feet. And when I come home to get away from him, you can’t even let me eat sapper in peace. Have to show me a lot of damn colored pictures of what some fool thinks a man’s insides look like.”

“Who gwine die, pappy?” Isom whispered.

Simon turned his head. “What you hangin’ eround here fer, boy? Go’n back to dat kitchen whar you belongs.”

“Supper waitin’,” Isom said. “Who dyin’, pappy?”

“Ain’t nobody dyin’. Does anybody soun’ dead? You git on outende house, now,”

Together they returned down the hall and entered the kitchen. Behind them the voices raged and stormed, blurred a little by walls, but dominant and unequivocal.

“Whut dey fighfin’ erbout, now?” Caspey, chewing, asked.

“Dat’s white folks’ bizness,” Simon told him. “You tend to yo’n, and dey’ll git erlong all right.” He sat down and Elnora rose and filled a cup from the coffee pot on the stove and brought it to him. “White folks got dey troubles same as niggers is. Gimme dat dish o’ meat, boy.”

In the house the storm ran its nightly course, ceased as though by mutual consent, both parties still firmly entrenched; resumed at the supper table the next evening. And so on, day after day, until the second week in July and six days after young Bayard had been fetched home with his chest crushed, Miss Jenny and old Bayard and Dr. Alford went to Memphis to consult a well-knownauthority on blood and glandular diseases with whom Dr. Alford, with some difficulty, had made a formal engagement. Young Bayard lay upstairs in his cast, but Simon and Elnora would be about the house ill day, and Narcissa Benbow had agreed to come out and keep him company.

Between the two of them they got old Bayard on the early train, still pro testing profanely like a stubborn and bewildered ox. There were others who knew them in the car. These stopped and spoke to them, and remarking Dr. Alford’s juxtaposition, became curious and solicitous. Old Bayard took these opportunities to assert himself again, with violent rumbling, but Miss Jenny hushed him coldly and implacably.

They took him, like a sullen small boy, in a cab to the clinic where the specialist waited them, and in a room resembling an easy and informal hotel lobby they sat among other consultants and an untidy clutter of magazines and papers, waiting for the specialist to arrive. They waited a long time. Meanwhile Dr. Alford from time to time assaulted the impregnable affability of the woman at the telephone switchboard, was repulsed and returned and sat stiffly beside his patient, aware that with every minute they waited, he was losing ground in Miss Jenny’s opinion of him. Old Bayard was cowed too, by this time, though occasionally he rumbled at Miss Jenny with stubborn and hopeless optimism. “Oh, stop swearing at me,” she interrupted him. “You can’t walk out now. Here, here’s the morning paper—take it and be quiet.”

Then the specialist entered briskly and crossed to the switchboard woman, where Dr. Alford saw him and rose and crossed to him. The specialist turned—a brisk, dapper man, who moved with arrogant jerky motions, as though he were exercising with a small sword, and who in turning, almost stepped on Dr. Alford. He shook Dr. Alford’s hand and broke into a high, desiccated stream of rapid words. “On the dot, I see. Promptness. Promptness. That’s good. Patient here? Asked for a room yet?”

“Yes, Doctor, he’s—”

“Good, good. Undressed her already, eh?”

“The patient is a m—”

“Just a moment.’’ The specialist turned. “Oh, Mrs. Smith?”

“Yes, Doctor “ The woman at the switchboard did not raise her head, and at that moment another specialist of some sort, a large one, with a profound, surreptitious air like a royal undertaker, entered andstopped Dr. Alford’s, and for a while the two of them alternately rumbled and rattled at one another while Dr. Alford stood ignored nearby, fuming stiffly and politely, feeling himself sinking lower and lower in Miss Jenny’s opinion of his professional status. Thai the two specialists had done, and Dr. Alford led his man toward his patient.

“Got the patient all ready, you say? Good, good; save time. Lunching down town today. Had lunch yourself?”

“No, Doctor. But the patient is a—”

“Daresay not,” the specialist agreed. “Plenty of time, though.” He turned briskly toward a curtained exit, but Dr. Alford took his arm firmly but courteously and halted him. Old Bayard was reading the paper. Miss Jenny was watching them with cold and smoldering disapproval

“Mrs. Du Pre, Colonel Sartoris,”Dr. Alford said, “this is Dr. Brandt. Colonel Sartoris is your p—”

“How d’ye do? How d’ye do?” the specialist said affably. “Come along with the patient, eh? Daughter? Granddaughter?” Old Bayard looked up.

“What?” he said, cupping his ear, and found the specialist staling at his face with abrupt interest.

“What’s that on your face?” he demanded, jerking his hand forth and touching the blackened scabby excrescence. When he did so, the thing came off in his fingers, leaving on old Bayard’s withered but unblemished cheek a round spot of skin rosy and fair as anybaby’s.

On the train that evening old Bayard, who had sat for a long time in deep thought, spoke suddenly.

“Jenny, what day of the month is this?”

“The ninth,” Miss Jenny answered. “Why?”

Old Bayard sat for a while longer. Then he rose. “Think I’ll go up and smoke a cigar,” he said. “Ireckon a little tobacco won’t hurt me, will it, Doctor?”

Three weeks later they got a bill from the specialist for fifty dollars. “Now I know why he’s so well known,” Miss Jenny said acidly. Then to old Bayard: “You’d better thank your stars it wasn’t your hat he lifted off.”

Toward Dr. Alford her manner is fiercely and belligerently protective; to old man Falls she gives the briefest and coldest nod and sails on with her nose in air; but to Loosh Peabody she does not speak at all.

8

She passed from the fresh, hot morning into the cool hall, where Simon uselessly and importantly proprietorial with a duster, bobbed his head to her. “Dey done gone to Memphis today,” he told her, “but Mist’ Bayard waitin’ fer you. Walk right up, missy.”

“Thank you,” she said, and she went on and mounted the stairs and left Mm busily wafting dust from one surface to another and then back again. The stairs curved onward into the upper hall and she mounted into a steady drift of air that blew through the open doors at the end of the hall; through these doors she could see a segment of blue dissolving lulls and salt-colored sky. At Bayard’s door she stopped and stood there for a time, clasping the book to her breast.

The house, despite Simon’s activity in the hall below, was a little portentously quiet, without the reassurance of Miss Jenny’s bustling presence and the cold ubiquity of her scolding. Faint sounds reached her from far away—out-of-doors sounds whose final drowsy reverberations drifted into the house on thevivid July air; sounds too somnolent and remote to the away.

But from the room before her no sound came at all Perhaps he was asleep; and the initial impulse—her given word, and the fortitude of her desperate heart which had enabled her to come out despite Miss Jenny’s absence—having served its purpose and deserted her, she stood just without the door, hoping that he was asleep, that he would sleep all day. Thus she found that she could still hope, and found in this fact a thin and derisive amusement.

But she would have to enter the room in order to find out if he slept, so she touched her hands to her face, as though by that she would restore to it its wonted serene repose for him to see, and entered.

“Simon?” Bayard said, having felt her presence through that sharpened sixth sense of the sick He lay onhis back, his hands beneath his head, gazing out the window, and she paused again just inside the door. At last; roused by her silence, he turned his head and Jus bleak gaze. “Well, I’ll be damned. I didn’t believe you’d come out today.”

“Yes,” she answered. “How do you feel?”

“Not after the way you sit with one foot in the hall all the time Aunt Jenny’s out of the room,” he continued. “Did she make you come out?”

“She asked me to come out. She doesn’t want you tobe alone all day, with just Simon in the house. Do you feel better today?”

“So?” he drawled. “Won’t you sit down, then?” She crossed to where her customary chair had been moved into a corner and drew it across the floor. He lay with his head cradled in his hands, watching her as she turned the chair about and seated herself. “What do you think about it?”

“About what?”

“About coming out to keep me company?”

“I’ve brought a new book,” she said evasively: “One H—one I just got. I hope you’ll like this one.”

“I hope so,” he agreed, but without conviction. “Seems like I’d like one after a while, doesn’t it? But what do you think about coming out here today?”

“I don’t think a sick person should be left alone with just negroes around. The name of this one is—”

“Why not send a nurse out, then? No use your coming, way out here.” She met his gaze at last, with her grave desperate eyes. “Why do you come, when you don’t want to?” he persisted.

“I don’t mind,” she answered hopelessly. She freed her gaze with an effort and opened the book. “The name of this one is—”

“Don’t,” he interrupted. “I’ll have to listen to that damn thing all day. Let’s talk a while.” But she presented him now the dark crown of her head, and her hands were motionless upon the book on her knees. “What makes you afraid to talk to me?” he demanded.

“Afraid?” she repeated, with her head bent above the book. “Had you rather I’d go?”

“What? No, dammit. I want you to be human for one time and talk to me. Come over here.” She would not look at him, but she could feel the moody, leashed violence of him like a steady glare of light beneath which she shrank and recoiled, and despite the assurance of his helpless immobility she was swept by sudden and unreasoning fear, and she raised her hands between them though he lay two yards away and helpless on his back. “Come over here closer,” he commanded. She rose, clutching the book.

“I’m going,” she said “I’ll tell Simon to stay where he can hear you call. Goodbye.”

“Here,” he exclaimed.She went swiftly to the door.

“Goodbye.”

“After what you just said; about leaving me alone with just niggers on the place?” She paused at the door, and he added with cold cunning: “After what Aunt Jenny told you? What’ll I tell her, tonight? Why are you afraid of a man flat on his back, in a damn cast-iron strait-jacket, anyway?” But she only looked at him with her desperate, hopeless eyes; “All right, dammit,” lie said violently. “Go, then.” And he jerked his head savagely on the pillow and stared again out the window while she returned to her chair. He said, mildly: “What’s the name of this one?” She told him. “Let her go, then. I reckon I’ll be asleep soon, anyway.”

She opened the book and began to read, swiftly, as though she were crouching behind the screen of words her voice raised between them. She read steadily on, her head bent over the book. She finished a sentence and stopped and sat utterly still above the book, but almost immediately he spoke. “Go on; I’m still here. Better luck next time.”

The forenoon passed on. Somewhere a clock rang the quarter hours, but saving this there was no sound from the other parts of the house. Simon’s activity below stairs had long ceased, but a murmur of voices reached her at intervals from somewhere, murmurously indistinguishable. The leaves on the tree beyond the window did not stir in the hot air, and upon it a myriad noises blended in a drowsy monotone— the negroes’ voices, sounds of stock from the barnyard, the rhythmic groaning of the water pump; a sudden cacophony of fowls in the garden beneath the window interspersed with Isom’s meaningless cries as he drove them out.

He was asleep now, and as she realized this she realized also that she did not know just when she had stopped reading. And she sat with the page open upon her knees, a page whose words left no echoes whatever in her mind, watching his calm face. It was again like a bronze made, purged by illness of the heat of its violence, yet with the violence still slumbering there and only refined a little.

She sat with the book open upon her lap, her hands lying motionless upon the opened page, gazing out the window. The curtains stirred faintly, and in the branches of the tree athwart the window the leaves twinkled lighdy beneath the intermittent fingers of the sun.

The clock rang again: a sound cool as stroked silver in the silent house, and preceded by cautious, stertorious breathing someone crept up the stairs, and after more surreptitious sounds Simon peered his disembodied head, like that of the curious and wizened grandfather of all apes, around the door. “Is you ‘sleep, Mist? Bayard?” he said in a loud, rasping tone.

“Shhhhhhhh,” she cautionedhim. “What is it?”

“Ef he ‘sleep, I don’t reckon he wants no dinnernow, do he?” Simon rasped.

“Be quiet. You’ll have to keep it until he wakes.”

“Yessum, I ‘speck so,” Simon agreed, lowering his voice a little. He entered on tiptoe, and while Narcissa watched him in mounting exasperation arid alarm, he scuffed across to the table with sounds as of a huge rat.

“What are you going to do?” she whispered. “You’d better go and tell Elnora to keep his dinner for him. I’ll call you when he wakes.”

“Yessum, I ‘speck so,” Simon agreed again. He now busied himself at the table, upon which the books they had read during the past two weeks werestacked one upon another; and as she rose swiftly and quietly he toppled the stack over and lunged clumsily at it and succeeded in knocking it to the floor with a random crash. Bayard opened eyes.

“Good Lord,” he said. “Why can’t you stay out of here?”

“Well, now!” Simon exclaimed in ready dismay. “Ef we ain’t woke ‘im up! Yes, suh, me en Miss Benbow done woke ‘im up. We wuz gwine save yo’ dinner, Mist’ Bayard, but I reckon you mought jes’ well eat it, long ez you ‘wake.”

“I reckon so,” Bayard agreed. “Bring it up, then. But damned if I wouldn’t like to know what objection you have to my sleeping. Thank God you were not born in a drove, like mosquitoes.”

“Des lissen at ‘im! Wake up quoilin’. You’ll feel better when you et some dinner,” he told the patient. Then to Narcissa: “Elnora got a nice dinner fer y’all.”

“Bring Miss Benbow’s up too” Bayard directed. “She can eat here. Unless you’d rather go down?”

In all his movements Simon was a caricature of himself, and he paused in an attitude of shocked reproof. “Dinin’ room mo’ suitable fer comp’ny,” he said.

“Yes, I’ll go down,” she decided promptly. “I won’t put Simon to that trouble.”

“’Tain’t no trouble,” Simon disclaimed. “I jes1 thought you mought like to git out fer a while, whar he can’t quoil at you. I’m gwine put it on de table right away, missy. You can walk right down.”

“Yes, I’ll come right down.” He departed, and she laid the book aside. “1tried to keep—”

“I know,” Bayard interrupted. “He won’t let anybody sleep through mealtime. And you’d better goand have yours, or he’ll carry everything back to thekitchen. And you don’t have to hurry back just onmy account,” he added .

“Don’t have to hurry back?” She paused at the door and looked back at him, “What do you mean?”

“I thought you might be tired of reading.”

“Oh,” she said, and looked away and stood fora moment clothed in her grave tranquility.

“Look here,” he said suddenly, “Are you sick or anything? Had you rather go home?”

“No,” she answered, rousing. “I’ll be back soon.”

She had her meal in lonely state in the sombre dining room while Simon, having dispatched Bayard’s tray by Isom, moved about the table and pressed dishes upon her with bland insistence or leaned against the sideboard and conducted a rambling monologue that seemed to have had no beginning and held no prospect of an end. It still flowed easily behind her as she went up the hall; as she stood in the door it was still going on, volitionless, as though entranced with its own existence and feeding on its own momentum. The salvia bed lay in an unbearable glare of white light, in clamorous splashes. Beyond it the drive shimmered with heat until, arched over with locust and oak, it descended in a cool green tunnel to the gates and the sultry ribbon of the highroad. Beyond the road fields stretched away shimmering, broken here and there by motionless clumps of trees, on to the hills dissolving bluely behind the July haze.

She leaned for a while against the door, in her white dress, her cheek against the cool, smooth plane of the jamb, in a faint draft that came steadily from somewhere, though no leaf stirred. Simon had finished in the dining room and a drowsy murmur of voices came up the hall from the kitchen, borneupon a thin stirring of air too warm to be called a breeze and upon which not even the cries of birds came.

At last she heard a movement from above stairs and she remembered Isom with Bayard’s tray, and she turned and did the parlor door ajar and entered. The shades were drawn closely, and the crack of light that followed her but deepened the gloom. She found the piano and stood beside it for a while, touching its dusty surface and thinking of Miss Jenny erect and indomitable in the gloom beside it. She heard Isom descend the stairs; soon his footsteps died away down the hall, and the drew out the bench and sat down and laid her arms along the closed lid.

Simon entered the dining room again, mumbling to himself and followed presently by Elnora, and they clashed dishes and talked again with a mellow rise and fall of consonantless and indistinguishable words. Then they went away, but still she sat with her arms along the cool wood, in the dark quiet room where even time stagnated a little.

The clock rang again, and she moved. I’ve been crying, she thought. “I’ve been crying,”she said in a sad whisper that savored its own loneliness arid its sorrow. At the tall mirror beside the parlor door she stood and peered at her dim reflection, touching her eyeswith her fingertips. Then she went on, but paused again at the stairs, listening, then she mounted briskly and entered Miss Jenny’s room and went on to her bathroom and bathed her face.

Bayard lay as she had left him. He was smoking a cigarette now. Between puffs he dabbed it casually at a saucer on the bed beside him. “Well?” he said.

“You’re going to set the house on fire that way,” she told him, removing the saucer. “You know Miss Jenny wouldn’t let you do that.”

“I know it,” he agreed, a little sheepishly, and she dragged the table over and set the saucer on it.

“Can you reachit now?”

“Yes, thanks. Did they give you enough to eat?”

“Oh, yes. Simon’s very insistent, you know. Shall Iread some more, or had you rather sleep?”

“Read, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay awake, thistime.”

“Is that a threat?” He looked at her quickly as she seated herself and took up the book.

“Say, what happened to you?” he demanded. “You acted like you were all in before dinner. Simon give you a drink, or what?”

“No, not that bad.” And she laughed, a little wildly, and opened the book. “I forgot to mark the place,” she said, turning the pages swiftly.“Do you remember—No, you were asleep. Shall I go back to where you stopped listening?”

“No, just read anywhere. It’s all about alike, I guess. If you’ll move a little nearer, I believe I can stayawake.”

“Sleep, if you want to. I don’t mind,” she answered.

“Meaning you won’t come any nearer?” he asked, watching her with his bleak gaze. She moved her chair nearer and opened the book again and turned the pages on, slowing and scanning them.

“I think it was about here,” she said, with indecision. “Yes.” She read to herself for a line or two, then she began aloud, read to the end of the page, where her voice trailed off and she creased her brow; turned the nest page then flipped it back. “I read this once; I remember it now.” And she turned onward again, with frowning indecision. “I must have been asleep too,” she said, and she glanced at him with ludicrous and friendly bewilderment. “I seem to have read pages and pages...”

“Oh, begin anywhere,” he repeated.

“No: wait; here it is.” She read again, and he lay watching her. At times she raised her eyes swiftly and found his eyes upon her face, bleakly but quietly. After a while he was no longer watching her, and at last, finding that his eyes were closed, she thought he slept. She finished the chapter and stopped

“No,” he said drowsily. “Not yet.” Then, when she failed to resume, he opened his eyesand asked for a cigarette. She laid the book aside and struck a match for him, then picked up the book again.

So the afternoon wore away. The negroes had gone, and no sound was in the house save that of her voice, arid the clock at quarter hour intervals; outside the shadows slanted more and more, peaceful harbingers of evening. Bayard was asleep now, despite his contrary conviction, and after a while she ceased and laid the book away. The long shape of him lay stiffly in its cast beneath the sheet, and she examined his bold immobile face with a little shrinking and yet with fascination, and her own patient and hopeless sorrow overflowed (there was enough of it to anneal the world) in pity for him. He was so utterly without any affection for any place or person or thing at all; too—too...hard (no, that’s not the word—but cold eluded her; she could comprehend hardness, but not coldness) to find relief by crying, even. Better to have lost it^ than never to have had it at all, at all.

The afternoon drew on; evening was finding itself. She sat musing and still and quiet, gazing out of the window where no wind yet stirred the leaves, as though she were waiting for someone to tell her what to do next, and she lost all account of time other than as a dark unhurrying stream into whichshe gazed until the mesmerism of water conjured the water itself away. Lost, lost; yet never to have had itstall...

He made an indescribable sound, and she turned her head quickly and saw his body straining terrifically in its cast, and his clenched hands and the snarl of his teeth beneath his lifted lip, and as she sat blanched and incapable of further movement he made the sound again. His breath hissed between his teeth and he screamed, a wordless sound that sank into a steady violence of profanity; and when she rose at last and stood over him with her hands against her mouth, his body relaxed and from beneath his sweating brow he watched her with wide intent eyes in which terror lurked, and mad, cold fury, and questioning despair.

“He damn near got me, then,” he said in a dry, light voice, still watching her from beyond the facing agony in his widely opened eyes. “There was a sort of loop of ‘em around my chest, and every time he fired, he twisted the loop a little tighter...” He fumbled at the sheet and tried to draw it up to his face. “Can you get me a handkerchief? Some in that top drawer there.”

“Yes,” she said, “yes? and she crossed to the chest Df drawers and held her trembling body upright by clinging to it, and found a handkerchief and returned. She tried to dry his brow and face, but finally he took the handkerchief from her and did it himself. “You scared me,” she moaned. “You scared me so bad. I thought...” .

“Sorry,” he said shortly. “I don’t do that on purpose. I want a cigarette.”

She gave it to him and struck the match, and he had to grasp her hand to hold the flame steady, andstill holding her wrist he drew deeply several times, She tried to free her wrist, but he held it in his hard fingers, and her trembling body betrayed her and she sank into her chair again, staring at him with ebbing terror and dread. He consumed the cigarette in deep, troubled draughts, and still holding her wrist, he began talking of his dead brother, without preamble, brutally. It was a brutal tale, without beginning, and crassly and uselessly violent and at times profane and gross, though its Very wildness robbed it of offensiveness just as its grossness kept it from obscenity. And beneath it all, the bitter struggling of his stubborn heart; and she sitting with her arm taut in his grasp and tier other hand pressed against hei mouth, watching him with terrified fascination.

“He was zig-zagging: that was the reason I couldn’t get on the Hun. Every time I got my sights on him, John’d barge in the way again. Then he quit zig-zagging. Soon as I saw him side-slip I knew it was all over. Then I saw the flame streaming out along his wing, and he was looking back at me. The Hun stopped shooting then, and all of us just lay there for a while. I couldn’t tell What John was up to until 1 saw him swing his legs outside. Then he thumbed his nose at me like he always was doing and flipped his hand at the Hun and kicked his machine out of the way and jumped. He jumped feet first. You can’t fall farfeet first, you know, and so pretty soon he sprawled out flat. There was a bunch of cloud right under us by that time, and he smacked on it right on his belly, Eke what we used to call gut-busters; in swimming. But I never could pick him up below the cloud. I know I was below it before he could have come out, because after I was down there his machine came diving out right at me, burning good. I pulled away from it, but the damn thing did a split-turn and rushed at me again, and I had to dodge. And so I never could pick him “up when he came out of the cloud. I went down fast, until I knew I was below him, then I looked again. But I couldn’t find him, and I thought maybe I hadn’t gone low enough, so I dived again. But I couldn’t pick him up. Then they started shooting at me from the ground—”

He talked on and her hand came away from her mouth and slid down her other arm and tugged at his fingers. “Please,”she whispered. “Please!” He ceased and looked at her and his fingers shifted, and just as she thought she was free they clamped again, and now both of her wrists were prisoners. She struggled, staring at him dreadfully, but he grinned his white cruel teeth at her and pressed her crossed arms down upon the bed beside him, “Please, please,’1 she implored, struggling; she could feel the flesh of her wrists, feel the bones turn in it like a loose garment; could see his bleak eyes and the cruel derision of his teeth, and suddenly she swayed forward in her chair and her head dropped between, her prisoned arms and she wept with hopeless and dreadful hysteria.

After a while there was no sound in the room again, and he looked at the dark crown of her head, and he lifted his hand and saw the braised discolorations where his hands had gripped her. But she did not move even then, and he dropped his hand upon her wrists again and lay quietly, and after a while even her trembling had ceased. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t do it again.” He could see only the top of herdark head, and her hands lay quietly beneath his. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I won’t do that anymore.”

“You won’t drive that car fast again?” she asked. With infinite small pains and slowly he turned himself, cast and all, by degrees onto his side, chewing his lip and swearing under his breath, and laid his other hand on her hair.

“What are you doing?” she said, but without moving. “You’ll break your ribs again.”

“Yes,” he agreed, stroking her hair awkwardly.

“That’s the trouble, right there,” she said. “That’s the way you act: doing things that—that—You do things to hurt yourself just to worry people* You don’t get any fun out of doing them.”

“No,” he agreed, and he lay with his chest full of hot needles, stroking her dark head with his hard, awkward hand. Far above him now the peak among the black and savage stars, and about him the valleys of tranquility and of peace. It was later still; already shadows were growing in the room, and beyond the window sunlight was a diffused radiance, sourceless yet palpable; from somewhere cows loved one to an-other* placidly and mournfully. At last she sat up.

“You’re all twisted. You’ll never get well, if you don’t behave yourself. Turn on your back, now.” He obeyed, slowly and painfully, his lip between his teeth and faint beads on his forehead, while she watched him with grave anxiety.“Does it hurt?”

“No,” he answered, and his hand shut again on her wrists that made no effort to withdraw. Then the sun was gone, and twilight, foster-dam of quietude and peace, filled the fading room and evening had found itself.

“And you won’t drive that car fast anymore?” she persisted from the dusk.

“No,” he answered.

9

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it, Horry?”

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

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nobody told me. Don’t Horace.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“When did I promise?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He promised he would.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miss Jenny said, “Hmph.”

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

“There’s the place,” he said.

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

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

10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” the cashier said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“See you tomorrow,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Goodnight, gentlemen,” the night watchman replied.

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

But the house was dark, and presently he slid tothe ground and with the desperate courage of his despair he stole across the lawn and stopped beneath awindow. There was alight somewhere toward thefront of the house, but no sound, no movement,and he stoodfor a time listening, darting his eyes thisway and that, covert and ceaseless as a cornered animal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Byron Snopes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’mallright.Let’s get away where we can talk.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOUR

1

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

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

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

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

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

“Dey come fer dey money,” Simon explained.

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How much is it?”

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

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

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

“Brudder Mo’ will now read out de amount,” theparson said. Brother Moore stared at the page andmumbled something in a weak, indistinguishablevoice.

“What?” old Bayard demanded.

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

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

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

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

“Dat’swhutdey claims,” Simon answered.

“What did you do with it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Simon was peering in the direction the churchcommittee had taken. “Dar now,” he said. “Whutyou reckon dey wants now?” For the deputation hadreturned and it now peered diffidently around the corner.

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

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

“You fergot de fawty cents, whitefolks.”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Imought need dis money, Cunnel,” he protested. “Seems like deymought leave me dis.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It isn’t senility, either.”

“All right. You’ll see, someday.”

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

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

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Darhe,”Isomsaid.

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

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

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

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

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

“Where?” Narcissa asked.

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

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

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

“Little ‘un, ain’t he?” Caspey asked.

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

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

“Here,” she answered. He came to her.

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

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

“Not tired already, are you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Gimme one, please, suh,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hush, Miss Jenny!”Narcissa repeated.

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

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

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

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

“You, Simon! Are you dead?” Simon removed theplates and bore them out, and the guests sat avoidingone another’s eyes a little, while Miss Jenny behindher barricade of cups andjugs and urns and things,continued to breathe fire and brimstone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How many have you got?” Narcissa asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Why, Eunice! It’s perfect.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” she answered. “I wish…”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Poor Horry,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Or every year,” she added. “Or day.”

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