Flags in the Dust

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Women friends?” he asked.

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

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

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

“What I look like?”

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

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

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

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

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

“It goes along too,” he answered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come away, Joan.”

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

“Yes. Come away.”

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

“Come away,” he repeated.

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

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

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

“You don’t know when she left?”

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

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

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

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

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

4

…this time it was a Ford car, and Bayard saw its wild skid as the driver jerked it across the treacherous thawing road, and the driver’s gaping mouth, and in the rushing moment and with brief amusement, between the man’s cravatless collar and the woman’s stocking wrapped about his head beneath his hat and tied under his chin, his Adam’s apple like a scared puppy in a tow sack. Then this flashed past and Bayard wrenched the wheel, and the stalled Ford swam sickeningly into view again as the big car slewed greasily upon the clay surface, its declutched engine roaring. Then the other car swam away again as he wrenched the wheel over and slammed the clutch out for more stability; and again that sickening, unhurried rush as the car refused to regain its feet and the depthless December world swept laterally across his vision. Old Bayard lurched against him again: from the corner of his eye he could see the fellow’s hand clutching at the edge of the door. Now they were facing the bluff on which the cemetery lay; directly over them John Sartoris’ effigy lifted its florid stone gesture, and from among motionless cedars gazed out upon the valley where for two miles the railroad he had built ran beneath his carven eyes. Bayard wrenched the wheel again.

On the other side of the road a ravine dropped sheer away, among-scrub cedars and corroded ridges skeletoned brittly with frost and muddy ice where the sun had not yet reached; the rear end of the carhung timelessly over this before it swung again, with the power full on, swung on until its nose pointed downhill again, with never a slackening of its speed. But still it would not come into the ruts again and it had lost the crown of the road, and though they had almost reached the foot of the hill, Bayard saw they would not make it. just before the rear wheel slipped off he wrenched the steering wheel over and swung the nose straight over the bank, and the car poised lazily for a moment, as though taking bread. “Hang on,” he shouted to his grandfather. Then they plunged.

An interval utterly without sound and in which all sensation of motion was lost. Then scrub cedar burst crackling about them and whipping branches of it exploded upon the nose of the car and slapped viciously at them as they sat with braced feet, and the car slewed in a long bounce. Another vacuum-like interval, then a shock that banged the wheel into Bayard’s chest and wrenched it in his tight hands, wrenched his arm-socket. Beside him his grandfather lurched forward and he threw out his arm just in time to keep the other from crashing through the windshield. “Hang on,” he shouted again. The car had never faltered and he dragged the leaping wheel over and swung it down the ravine arid opened the engine again, and with the engine and the momentum of the pilings they crashed on down the ravine ‘ and turned and heaved up the now shallow bank and onto the road again. Bayard brought it to a stop.

He sat motionless for a moment, “Whew,” he said. And then: “Great God in the mountain.” His grandfather sat quietly beside him, his hand still on the door and his head bent a little. “Think I’ll have a cigarette, after that,” Bayard added. He found one in his pocket, and a match; his hands were shaking. “Ithought of that damn concrete bridge again, just as she went over,” he explained, a little apologetically. He took a deep draught at his cigarette and glanced at his grandfather. “Y’all right?” Old Bayard made no reply, and with the cigarette poised, Bayard looked at him. He sat as before, his head bent a little and his hand on the door. “Grandfather?” Bayard said sharply. Still old Bayard didn’t move, even when his grandson flung the cigarette away and shook him roughly.

5

Up the last hill the tireless pony bore him, and in the low December sun their shadow fell longly across the hardwood ridge and into the valley, from which the high, shrill yapping of the dogs came again upon the frosty windless air. Young dogs, Bayard told himself, and he sat his horse in the faint scar of the road, listening as the high breathless hysteria of them swept echoing across his aural field though the race itself was hidden beyond the trees. Motionless, he could feel frost in the air. Above him the pines, though there was no wind in them, made a continuous dry, wild sound; above them against the high evening blue, a shallow V of geese slid. There’ll be ice tonight, he thought, thinking of black backwaters where they would come to rest, of rank bayonets of dead grasses about which the water would shrink soon in the brittle darkness, in fixed glassy ripples. Behind him the earth rolled away ridge on ridge blue as woodsmoke, on into a sky like thin congealed blood. He turned in his saddle and stared unwinking into the bloody west against which the sun spread like a crimson egg broken upon the ultimate hills.

That meant weather: he snuffed the motionless tingling air, hoping he smelled snow.

The pony snorted and tossed ins head experimentally, and found the reins were slack and lowered his head and snorted again into the dead leaves and the delicate sere needles of pine at his feet. “Come up, Perry,” Bayard said, jerking the reins. Perry raised his head and broke into a stiff, jolting trot, but Bayard lifted him out of it and curbed him again into his steady foxtrot. The sound of the dogs had ceased, but he had not gone far when they broke again into clamorous uproar to his left, and suddenly near, and as he reined Perry back and peered ahead along the quiet, fading scar of it, he saw the fox trotting sedately toward him in the middle of the road. Perry saw it at the same time and laid his fine ears back and rolled his young eyes. But the animal came on, placidly unawares at its steady, unhurried trot, glancing back over its shoulder from time to time. ‘Well, PU be damned,’’ Bayard whispered, holding Perry rigid between his knees. The fox was not forty yards away, yet still it came on, seemingly utterly unaware of the man and horse. Then Bayard shouted.

The fox glanced at him;;the level sun swam redly and fleetingly in its eyes, then with a single modest flash of brown it was gone. Bayard expelled his breath: his heart was thumping against his ribs. “Whooy,” he yelled. “Come on, dogs!” The dogs heard him and their din swelled to a shrill pandemonium and the pack swarmed wildly into the road in a mad chaos of spotted hides and flapping ears and tongues, and surged toward him. None of them was more than half grown, and ignoring the horse and rider they burst still clamoring into the undergrowth where the fox had vanished and shrieked frantically on; and as Bayard stood in his stirrups and peeredafter them, preceded by yapping in a yet higher and more frantic key, two even smaller puppies moiled out of the woods and galloped past him on their short legs with whimpering cries and expressions of ludicrous and mad concern. Then the clamor died into hysterical echoes, and so away.

He rode on. On either hand were hills: the one darkling like a bronze bastion, upon the other the final rays of the sun lay redly. The air crackled with frost and tingled in his nostrils and seared his lungs with fiery, exhilarating needles. The road followed the valley; but half the sun now showed above the western wall, and among trees stark as the bars of a grate, he rode stirrup-deep in shadow like cold water. He would just about reach the house before dark. The clamor of the dogs swelled again ahead of him, approaching the road again, and he lifted Perry into a canter.

Presently before him lay a glade—an old field, sedge-grown, its plow-scars long healed over. The sun filled it with dying light, and he pulled Perry short upstanding: there, at the corner of the field beside the road, sat the fox. It sat there like a tame dog, watching the woods across the glade, and Bayard shook Perry forward again. The fox turned its head and looked at him with a covert, fleeting glance, but without alarm, and Bayard stopped again in intense astonishment. The clamor of the dogs swept nearer through the woods, yet still the fox sat on its haunches, watching the man with-covert quick glances. It revealed no alarm whatever, not even when the puppies burst yapping madly from the trees. They moiled at the wood’s edge for a time while the fox watched them. The largest one, evidently the leader, saw the quarry. Immediately they ceased their noise and trotted across the glade andsquatted in a circle facing the fox, their tongues lolling. Then with one accord they all faced about and watched the darkening woods, from which and nearer and nearer, came that spent yapping in a higher key and interspersed with whimpering. The leader barked once; the yapping among the trees swelled with frantic relief and the two smaller puppies burst forth and burrowed like moles through the sedge and came up. Then the fox rose and cast another quick, covert glance at the horseman, and surrounded by the amicable weary calico of the puppies, trotted across the glade and vanished among the darkening trees. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Bayard said. “Come up, Perry.”

At last a pale and windless plume of smoke stood above the trees, against the sky, and in the rambling, mud-chinked wall a window glowed with ruddy invitation across the twilight Dogs had already set up a resonant, bell-like uproar; above it Bayard could distinguish the dear tenor of puppies and a voice shouting at them, and as he pulled Perry to a halt in the yard, the fox was vanishing diffidently but without haste beneath the back porch. A lean figure faced him in the dusk, with an axe in one hand and an armful of wood, and Bayard said:

“What the devil’s that thing, Buddy? That fox?”

“That’s Ethel,” Buddy answered. He put the wood down deliberately, and the axe, and he came and shook Bayard’s hand once, limply, in the country fashion, but his hand was hard and firm. “How you?”

“All right,” Bayard answered. “I came out to get that old fox Rafe was telling me about.”

“Sure,” Buddy agreed in his Slow, infrequent voice. “We been expectin’ you. Git down and lemme take yo’pony.”

“No, I’ll do it. You take the wood on in; I’ll putPerry up.” But Buddy was firm, without insistence or rudeness, and Bayard surrendered the horse to him. :

“Henry,” Buddy shouted toward the house, “Henry.” A door opened upon jolly leaping flames; a figure stood squatly in it.“Here’s Bayard,” Buddy said. “Go on in and warm,” he added, leading the horse away. Dogs surrounded him; he picked up the wood and the axe and moved toward the house in a ghostly surge of dogs, and the figure stood in the door while he mounted the veranda and leaned the axe against the wall.

“How you?” Henry said, and again the handshake was limp; again the hand was firm and kind, harsher though than Buddy’s hard young flesh. He relieved Bayard of the wood and they entered the house. The walls were of chinked logs; upon them bung two colored outdated calendars and a patent medicine lithograph. The floor was bare, of hand-trimmed boards scuffed with heavy boots and polished by the pads of generations of dogs; two men could lie side by side in the fireplace. In it now four-foot logs blazed against the clay fireback, swirling in wild plumes into the chimney’s dark maw, and in silhouette against it, his head haloed by the fine shaggy disorder of his hair, Virginius MacCallum sat.“Hyer’s Bayard Sartoris, pappy,” Henry said.

The old man turned in his chair with grave, leonine deliberation and extended his hand without rising. In 1861 he was sixteen and he walked to Lexington, Virginia, and enlisted, served four years in the Stonewall brigade and walked back to Mississippi and built himself a house and got married. His wife’s dot was a clock and a dressed hog; his own father gave them a mule. His wife was dead these many years, and her successor was dead, but he satnow before the fireplace at which that hog had been cooked, beneath the roof he had built in ‘66, and on the mantel above him the clock sat, deriding that time whose creature it had once been. ‘Well, boy?” he said. “You took yo’ time about comin’. How’s yo’ folks?”

“Pretty well, sir,” Bayard answered. He looked at the old man’s hale, ruddy face intently and sharply. No, they hadn’t heard yet.

“We been expectin’ you ever since Rafe seen you in town last spring. Hyer, Henry, tell Mandy to set another plate.”

Four dogs had followed him into the room. Three of them watched him gravely with glowing eyes; the other one, a blue-ticked hound with an expression of majestic gravity, came up and touched its cold nose to his head “Hi, Gen’ral,” he said, rubbing its ears, whereupon the other dogs approached and thrust their noses against his hands.

“Pull up a cheer,”Mr. MacCallum said. He squared his own chair around and Bayard obeyed, and the dogs followed him, surging with blundering decorum about his knees, “I keep sendin’ word in to git yo’ gran’pappy out hyer,” the old man continued, “but he’s too ‘tarnal proud, or too damn lazy to come. Hyer, Gen’ral! Git away from thar. Kick ‘em away, Bayard. Henry!” he shouted. Henry appeared “Take these hyer damn dawgs out till after supper.”

Henry drove the dogs from the room. Mr. MacCallum picked up a long pine sliver from the hearth and fired it and lit his pipe, and smothered the sliver in the ashes and laid it on the hearth again. “Rafe and Lee air in town today,” he said. “You could have come out in the waggin with them. But I reckon you’d ruther have yo’own hoss.”

“Yes, sir,” he answered quietly. Then they would. know. He stared into the fee for a time, robbing his hands slowly on his knees, and for an instant he saw the recent months of his life coldly in all their headlong and heedless wastefulness; saw it like the swift unrolling of a film, culminating in that which any fool might have foreseen. Well, dammit, suppose it had: was he to blame? had he insisted that his grandfather ride with him? had he given the old fellow a bum heart? And then, coldly: you were scared to go home. You made a nigger sneak your horse out for yon. Yon, who deliberately do things your judgment tells you may not be successful, even possible, are afraid to face the consequences of your own acts. Then again something bitter and deep and sleepless in him blazed out in vindication and justification and accusation; what, he knew not, blazing out at what. Whom, he did not know: You did it! You caused it all: you killed Johnny.

Henry had drawn a chair up to the fire, and after a while the old man tapped his clay pipe carefully out against his palm and drew a huge, turnip-shaped silver watch from his corduroy vest “Half after five,” he said. “Ain’t them boys come yet?”

“They’re here,” Henry answered briefly. “Heard ‘em takin’ out when I put out the dawgs.”

“Git the jug, then,” his father ordered. Henry rose and departed again, and feet clumped heavily on the porch and Bayard turned in his chair and stared bleakly at the door. It opened and Rafe and Lee entered

“Well, well,” Rafe said, and his lean dark face lighted a little. “Got here at last, did you?” He shook Bayard’s hand, and Lee followed him. Lee’s face, like all of them, was a dark, saturnine mask. He was not so stocky as Rafe, and least talkative of them all. Hiseyes were black and restless; behind them livedsomething quick and wild and sad: he shook Bayard’shand without a word.

But Bayard was watching Rafe. There was nothing in Rafe’s face; no coldness, no questioning—Was it possible that he could have been to town, and not heard? Or had Bayard himself dreamed it? But he remembered that unmistakable feel of his grandfather when he had touched him, remembered how he had suddenly slumped as though the very fibre of him, knit so erect and firm for so long by pride and by his unflagging and hopeless struggling against the curse of his name, had given way all at once, letting his skeleton rest at last Mr. MacCallum spoke.

“Did you go by the express office?”

“We never got to town,” Rafe answered. “Axle tree broke just this side of Vernon. Had to uncouple the wagon and drive to Vernon and get it patched up. Too late to go in, then. We got our supplies there and come on home.”

“Well, no matter. You’ll be goin’ in next week, for Christmas,” the old man said, and upon a breath of vivid darkness Buddy entered and came and squatted leanly in the shadowy chimneycorner.

“Got that fox you were telling me about hid out yet?” Bayard asked Rafe.

“Sure. And we’ll get ‘im, this time. Maybe tomorrow. Weather’s changin’.”

“Snow?”

“Might be. What’s it goin’ to do tonight, pappy?”

“Rain,”the old man answered. “Tomorrow, too. Scent won’t lay good until Wen’sday. Henry!” After a moment he shouted Henry again, and Henry entered, with a blackened steaming kettle and a stoneware jug and a thick tumbler with a metal spoon in it. There was somethingdomestic, womanish, aboutHenry, with his squatslightly tubby figure and his mild brown eyes and his capable, unhurried hands. He it was who superintended the kitchen (he was a better cook now than Mandy) and the house, where he could be found most of the day, pottering soberly at some endless task. He visited town almost as infrequently as his father; he cared little for hunting, and his sole relaxation was making whisky, good whisky, in a secret fastness known only to his father and to the negro who assisted him, after a recipe handed down from lost generations of his dour and uncommunicative forbears. He set the kettle and the jug and the tumbler on the hearth, and took the clay pipe from his father’s hand and put it on the mantel, and reached down a cracked tumbler of sugar and seven glasses, each with a spoon in it. The old man leaned forward into the firelight and made the toddies one by one, with tedious and sober deliberation. When he had made one around, there were two glasses left. “Ain’t them other boys come in yet?” he asked. Nobody answered, and he corked the jug. Henry set the two extra glasses back on the mantel.

Mandy came to the door presently, filling it with her calico expanse. “Y’all kin come in now,” she said, and as she turned waddling Bayard spoke to her and she paused as the men rose. The old man was straight as an Indian, and with the exception of Buddy’s lean and fluid length, he towered above his sons by a head. Mandy waited beside the door until they had passed, and gave Bayard her hand. “You ain’t been out in a long while, now,” she said. “And I bet you ain’t fergot Mandy, neither.”

“Sure, I haven’t,” Bayard agreed. But he had. Money, to Mandy, did not compensate for some trinket of no value which John never forgot to bring her when he came. He followed the others into thefrosty darkness again. Beneath his feet the ground was already stiffening; overhead the sky was brilliant with stars; He stumbled a little behind the clotted backs until Rafe opened a door into a separate building, upon a room filled with warmth and a thin blue haze in which a kerosene lamp burned steadily, and odors of food, and stood aside until they had entered In the middle of the floor the table was laid, on it the lamp stood and at one end was placed a chair. The two sides and the other end were paralleled by backless benches. Against the further wall was the stove, and a huge cupboard of split boards, and a woodbox. Behind the stove two negro men and a half-grown boy sat, their faces shining with heat and with white rolling eyes; about their feet five puppies snarled with mock savageness at one another or chewed damply at the negroes’ static ankles or prowled about beneath the stove and the adjacent floor with blundering, aimless inquisitiveness.

“Howdy, boys,” Bayard said, calling them by name, and they bobbed at him with diffident flashes of teeth.

“Put dem puppies up, Richud,” Mandy ordered. The negroes gathered the puppies up one by one and stowed them away in a smaller box behind the stove, where they continued to move about with scratchings and bumpings and an occasional smothered protest. From time to time during the meal a head would appear suddenly, staring over the box edge with blinking and solemn curiosity, then vanish with an abrupt scuffling thump and more protests, and moiling, infant-like noises rose again. “Hush up, dawgs! G’awn to sleep now,” Richard would say, rapping the box with his knuckles. At last the noise ceased.

The old man took the chair, his sons around him, and the guest; some coatless, all collarless, with theirdark, saturnine faces stamped all clearly from the same die. They ate. Sausage, and spare ribs, and a dish of hominy and one of fried sweet potatoes, and cornbread and a molasses jug of sorghum, and Mandy poured coffee from a huge enamelware pot. In the middle of the meal the two missing ones came in—Jackson, the eldest, a man of fifty-five, with a broad, high forehead and thick brows and an expression at once dreamy and intense—a sort of shy and impractical Cincinnatus; and Stuart, forty-four and Rafe’s twin. Yet although they were twins, there was no closer resemblance between them than between any two of them. As though thediewas too firm and made too clean an imprint to be either hurried or altered, even by nature. Stuart had none of Rafe’s easy manner (Rafe was the only one of them that, by any stretch of the imagination, could have been called loquacious); on the other hand, he had much of Henry’s placidity. He was a good farmer and a canny trader, and he had a respectable bank account of his own. Henry, fifty-three, was the second son.

They ate with silent and steady decorum, with only the barest essential words, but amicably. Mandy moved back and forth between table and stove.

Before the meal was finished a sudden bell-like uproar of dogs floated up and seeped, muted by the tight walls, into the room. “Dar, now.” The negro Richard cocked his head. Buddy poised his coffee.

“Where are they, Dick?”

“Right back of de spring house. Dey got ‘im, too.” Buddy rose and slid leanly from his corner.

“I’ll go with you,” Bayard said, rising also. The others ate steadily. Richard got a lantern down from the cupboard top and lit it, and the three of them stepped out into the chill darkness across which the baying of the dogs came in musical gusts, ringing asfrosty glass. It was chill and dark. The house loomed its rambling low wall broken by the ruddy glow of the window. “Ground’s about hard already,” Bayard remarked,

“‘Twon’t freeze tonight,” Buddy answered. “Will it,Dick?”

“Naw, suh. Gwine rain.”

“Go on,” Bayard said. “I don’t believe it.”

“Pappy said so,”Buddy answered. “Warmer’n ‘twas at sundown.”

“Don’t feel like it, to me,” Bayard insisted. They passed the wagon motionless in the starlight, its tires glinting like satin ribbons, and the long, rambling stable, from which placid munchings came, and an occasional snuffing snort as the lantern passed. The lantern twinkled among tree trunks as the path descended; the clamor of the dogs swelled just beneath them, and in a sapling just behind the spring house they found the ‘possum, curled motionless and with its eyes tightly shut, in a fork not six feet from the ground. Buddy lifted it down by the tail, unresisting. “Hell,” Bayard said.

Buddy called the dogs away, and they mounted the path again. In a disused shed behind the kitchen what seemed like at. least fifty eyes gleamed in matched red points as Buddy swung the lantern in... and flashed it onto a cage screened with chicken wire, from which rose a rank, warm odor and in which grizzled furry bodies moved sluggishly or swung sharp, skull-like faces into the light. He opened the door and dumped his latest capture in among its fellows and gave the lantern to Richard. They emerged. Already the sky was hazing over a ‘ little, losing its brittle brilliance.

The others sat in a semicircle before the fire; at theold man’s feet the blue-ticked hound dozed. They made room for Bayard, and Buddy squatted again in the chimney corner.

“Git ‘im?”Mr. MacCallum asked.

“Yes, sir,” Bayard answered. “Like lifting your hat off a nail in the wall.”

The old man puffed again. “We’ll give you a sho’‘nough hunt befo’you leave.”

Rafe said: “How many you got now, Buddy?”

“Ain’t got but fo’teen,” Buddy answered.

“Fo’teen?” Henry repeated. “We won’t never eat fo’teen ‘possums.”

“Turn ‘em loose and run ‘em again, then,” Buddy answered. The old man puffed slowly at his pipe. The others smoked or chewed also, and Bayard produced his cigarettes and offered them to Buddy. Buddy shook his head.

“Buddy ain’t never started yet,” Rafe said.

“You haven’t?” Bayard asked. “What’s the matter, Buddy?”

“Don’t know,” Buddy answered, from his shadow. “Just ain’t had time to learn, I reckon.”

The fire crackled and swirled; from time to time Stuart, nearest the box, put another log on. The dog at the old man’s feet dreamed, snuffed; soft ashes swirled on the hearth at its nose and it sneezed and woke, raised its head and blinked up at the old man’s face, then dozed again. They sat without word or movement, their grave, aquiline faces as though carved by the firelight out of the shadowy darkness, shaped by a angle thought and smoothed and colored by the same hand. The old man tapped his pipe carefully out upon his palm and consulted his fat silver watch. Eight o’clock.

“We’uns git up at fo’o’clock, Bayard,” he said.

“But you don’t have to git up till daylight. Henry, git the jug.”

“Four o’clock,” Bayard repeated, as he and Buddy undressed in the lamplit chill of the lean-to room in which, in a huge wooden bed with a faded patchwork quilt, Buddy slept. “I don’t see why you bother to go to bed at all.” As he spoke his breath vaporized in the chilly air.

“Yes,” Buddy agreed, ripping his shirt over his head and kicking his lean, race-horse shanks out of his shabby khaki pants. “Don’t take long to spend the night at our house. You’re comp’ny, though.” Buddy’s preparations for sleeping were simple: he removed his boots and pants and shirt and went to bed in his woolen underwear, and he now lay with only his round head in view, watching Bayard who stood in a sleeveless jersey and short thin trunks. “You ain’t goin’ to sleep warm that-a-way,” Buddy added. ‘You want one o’ my heavy ‘uns?”

“I’ll sleep warm, I guess,” Bayard answered. He blew the lamp out and groped his way to the bed, his toes curling away from the icy floor, and got in. The mattress was filled with corn shucks; it rattled beneath him, drily sibilant, and whenever he or Buddy moved at all or took a deep breath even, the shucks shifted with small ticking sounds.

“Git that ‘ere quilt tucked in good over there,” Buddy advised from the darkness, emitting his breath in a short explosive sound of relaxation and contentment He yawned, audible but invisible. “Ain’t seen you in a long while,” he suggested.

“That’s right. Let’s see, when was it? Two—three years, wasn’t it?”

“Nineteen fifteen,” Buddy answered. “Last timeyou and him...” He ceased suddenly. Then he added quietly: “I seen in a paper, when it happened. The name. Kind of knowed right off ‘twas him. It was a limey paper.”

“You did? Where were you?”

“Up there,” Buddy answered. “Where them limeys was. Where they sent us. Flat country. Don’t see how they ever drained it enough to make a crop, with all that rain.”

“Yes,” Bayard said. His nose was like a lump of ice. He could feel his breath warming his nose a little, could almost see the pale smoke of it as he breathed; could feel the inhalation chilling his nostrils again. It seemed too that he could feel the planks of the ceiling as they sloped down to the low wall on Buddy’s side, could feel the atmosphere packed into the low corner, bitter and chill and thick, too thick for breathing, like invisible slush; and he lay beneath it...He was aware of the dry ticking of shucks beneath him and discovered so that he was breathing in deep troubled draughts and he wished dreadfully to be up, moving, before a fire, light; anywhere, anywhere. Buddy lay beside him in the oppressive, half-congealed solidity of the chill, talking in his slow, inarticulate idiom of the war. It was a vague, dreamy sort of tale, without beginning or end and with stumbling reference to places wretchedly pronounced—you got an impression of people, creatures without initiation or background or future, caught tunelessly in a maze of solitary conflicting preoccupations, like bumping tops, against an imminent but incomprehensible nightmare.

“How’d you like the army, Buddy?”

“Not much,” Buddy answered. “Ain’t enough to do. Good life for a lazy man.” He mused a moment.

“They gimme a medal,” he added, in a burst ofshy, diffident confidence and sober pleasure. “I aimed to show it to you, but I fergot. Do it tomorrow. That ‘ere flo’s to dang cold to tech till I have to. I’ll watch a chance when pappy’s outen the house.”

“Why? Don’t he know you got it?”

“He knows,” Buddy answered. “Only he don’t like it because he claims it’s a Yankee medal. Rafe says pappy and Stonewall Jackson ain’t never surrendered.”

“Yes,” Bayard repeated. After a while Buddy ceased and sighed again, emptying his body for sleep. But Bayard lay rigidly oh his back, his eyes wide open. It was like being drunk and whenever you close your eyesthe room starts going round and round, and so you sit rigid in the dark with your eyes wide open not to get sick. Buddy had ceased talking; presently his breathing became longer, steady and regular, and the shuck; shifted with sibilant complaint, as Bayard turned slowly onto his side.

But Buddy breathed on in the darkness, steadily and peacefully. Bayard could hear his own breathing also, but above it, all around it, surrounding him, that other breathing. As though he were one thing breathing with restrained laboring, within himself breathing with Buddy’s breathing; using up all the air so that the lesser thing must pant for it. Meanwhile the greater thing breathed peacefully and steadily and unawares, asleep, remote; ay, perhaps dead. Perhaps he was dead, and he recalled that morning, relived it again with strained and intense attention from the time he had seen the first tracer smoke, until from his steep side-slip he watched the flame burst like the gay flapping of an orange pennon from John’s Camel and saw his brother’s familiar gesture and the sudden awkward sprawl of his plunging body as it lost equilibrium in midair; relived itagain as you might run over a printed tale, trying to remember, feel, a bullet going into his body or head that might have slain him at the same instant. That would account for it, would explain so much: that he too was dead and this was hell, through which he moved forever and ever with an illusion of quickness, seeking his brother who in turn was somewhere seeking him, never the two to meet. He turned onto his back again; the shucks whispered beneath him with dry derision. .

The house was full of noises; to his sharpened senses the silence was myriad: the dry agony of wood in the black frost; the ticking of shucks as he breathed; the very atmosphere itself like slush ice in the vice of the cold, oppressing his lungs. His feet were cold, his limbs sweated with it, and about his hot heart his body was rigid and shivering and he raised his naked arms above the covers and lay for a time with the cold like a lead cast about them. And all the while Buddy’s steady breathing and his own restrained and labored breath, both sourceless yet involved one with the other.

Beneath the covers again his arms were cold across his chest and his hands were like ice upon his ribs, and he moved with infinite caution while the chill croached from his shoulders downward and the hidden shucks chattered at him, and swung his legs to the floor, and his curling toes. He knew where the door was and he groped his way to it. It was fastened by a wooden bar, smooth as ice; he fumbled this out of its slots carefully and without noise. The door had sagged from the hinges and after the first jarring scrape, he grasped the edge of it in his chill fingers and raised it and swung it back, and stood in the door.

In the sky no star showed, and the sky was the sagging corpse of itself. It lay upon the earth like a deflated balloon; into it the dark shape of the kitchen rose without depth, and the trees beyond, and homely shapes like chill ghosts in the cold corpse-light—the woodpile; a farming tool; a barrel beside the broken stoop at the kitchen door, where he had stumbled, supperward. The gray chill seeped into him like water into sand, with short trickling runs; halting, groping about an obstruction, then on again, trickling at last along his unimpeded bones. He was shaking slowly and steadily with cold; beneath his hands his flesh was rough and without sensation, yet still it jerked and jerked as though something within the dead envelope of him strove to free itself. Above his head, upon the wooden roof, there sounded a single light tap, and as though at a signal, the gray silence began to dissolve. He shut the door silently and returned to bed.

In the bed he lay shaking more than ever, to the cold derision of the shucks under him, and he lay quietly on his back, hearing the winter rain whispering on the roof. There was no drumming, as when summer rain falls through the buoyant air, but a whisper of unemphatic sound, as though the atmosphere lying heavily upon the roof dissolved there and dripped sluggishly and steadily from the eaves. His blood flowed again, and the covers felt like iron or like ice; but while he lay motionless beneath the rain his blood warmed yet more, until at last his body ceased trembling and he lay presently in something like a tortured and fitful doze, surrounded by coiling images and shapes of stubborn despair and the ceaseless striving for…not vindication so much as comprehension, a hand, no matter whose, to touch him out of his black chaos. He would spurn it, of course, but it would restore his cold sufficiency again.

The rain dripped on, dripped and dripped; beside him Buddy breathed placidlyand steadily: he had not even changed his position. At times Bayard dozed fitfully: dozing, he was wide awake; waking, he lay in a hazy state filled with improbable moiling and in which there was neither relief nor rest: drop by drop the rain wore the night away, wore time away. But it was so long, so damn long. His spent blood, wearied with struggling, moved through his body in slow beats, like the rain, wearing his flesh away. It comes to all...Bible...some preacher, anyway. Maybe he knew. Peace. It comes to all.

At last, from beyond walls, he heard movement. It was indistinguishable, yet he knew it was of human origin, of people he knew ‘waking again into the world he had not been able even temporarily to lose, people to whom he was...and he was comforted. The sounds continued, and at last and unmistakably he heard a door, and a voice Which he knew that with a slight effort of concentration he” could name; and best of all, that he could rise and go where they were gathered about a crackling fire. Arid he lay, at ease at last, intending to rise the next moment and go to them, putting it off a little longer while his blood beat slowly through his body and his heart was quieted. Buddy breathed steadily beside him, and his own breath was quiet now as Buddy’s while the human sounds came murmurously into the cold room with grave and homely reassurance. It comes to all, it comes to all, his tired heart comforted him, and at last he slept.

He waked in the gray morning, his body wearyand heavy and dull: his sleep had not rested him. Buddy was gone, and it still rained, though now it was adefinite sound on the roof and the air was warmer, with a rawness that probed into the very bones of him; and in his stockings and carrying his scarred, expensive boots in his hands, he traversed the cold room where Lee and Rafe and Stuart slept, and found Rafe and Jackson before the living-room fire.

“We let you sleep,” Rafe said, then he said: “Good Lord, boy, you look like a hant. Didn’t you sleep lastnight?”

“Yes, I slept all right,” Bayard answered. He sat down and stamped into his boots, and buckled the thongs below his knees. Jackson sat at one side of the hearth; in the shadowy corner near his feet a number of small, living creatures moiled silently, and still bent over his boots Bayard said:

“What you got there, Jackson? What sort of puppies are them?”

“New breed Tin trying Jackson answered, and Rafe approached with a half a tumbler of Henry’s pale amber whisky.

“Them’s Ethel’s pups,” he said. “Git Jackson to tell you about ‘em after you eat Here, drink this. You look all wore but. Buddy must a kept you awake, talkin’,” he added, with dry irony.

Bayard accepted the glass and emptied it, and lit a cigarette. “Mandy’s got yo’ breakfast on the stove,”‘ Rafe added.

‘‘Ethel?’’ Bayard repeated. “Oh, that fox. I aimed to ask about her, last night.”

“Yes, Jackson aims to revolutionize the huntin’ business, with her. Aims to raise a breed of animals with a hound’s wind and bottom, and a fox’s smartness and speed.”

Bayard approached the shadowy corner and examined the small creatures with interest and curiosity.

“I never saw many fox pups,” he said at last, “but I never saw any that looked like them.”

“That’s what Gen’ral seems to think,” Rafe answered,

Jackson spat into the fire and stooped over the creatures. They knew his hands, and the moiling of them became more intense, and Bayard then noticed that they made no sound at all, not even puppy whimperings. “Hit’s a experiment,” Jackson explained. “The boys makes fun of ‘em, but they haint no more’n weaned, yet. You wait and see.”

“Don’t know what you’ll do with ‘em,” Rafe said brutally. “They won’t be big enough for work stock. Better git yo’ breakfast, Bayard.”

“You wait and see,” Jackson repeated. He touched the scramble of small bodies with his hands, in a gentle, protective gesture. “You can’t tell nothin’‘bout a dawg ‘twell hit’s at least two months old, can you?” he appealed to Bayard, looking up at him with his vague, intense gaze from beneath his shaggy brows.

“Go git yo’ breakfast, Bayard,” Rafe repeated. “Buddy’s done goneand left you.”

He bathed his face with icy water in a tin pan on the porch, and ate his breakfast—ham and eggs and flapjacks and sorghum and coffee—while Mandy talked to him about his brother. When he returned to the house old Mr. MacCallum was there. The puppies moiled inextricably in their corner, and the old man sat with his hands on his knees, watching them with bluff and ribald merriment, while Jackson sat nearby in a sort of Covering concern, like a hen,

“Come hyer,boy,” the old man ordered when Bayard appeared “Hyer, Rafe, git me that ‘ere bait line.” Rafe went out, returning presently with a bit of pork rind on the end of a string. The old man tookit and rose, and hauled the puppies ungently into the light, where they crouched abjectly moiling—as strange a litter as Bayard had ever seen. No two of them looked alike, and none of them looked like anything else. Neither fox nor hound; partaking of both, yet neither; and despite their soft infancy, there was about them something monstrous and contradictory and obscene. Here a fox’s keen, cruel muzzle between the melting, sad eyes of a hound and its mild ears; there limp fears tried valiantly to stand erect and failed ignobly in flapping points; shoebutton eyes in meek puppy faces, and limp brief tails brushed over with a faint, golden fuzz like the inside of a chestnut burr. As regards color,, they ranged from pure reddish brown through ail indiscriminate brindle to pure ticked beneath a faint dun cast; and one of them had, feature for feature, old General’s face in comical miniature, even to his expression of sad and dignified disillusion. “Watch ‘em, now,” the old man ordered.

He got them all facing forward, then he dangled the meat directly behind them. Not one noticed it; he swept it back and forth above their heads; not one looked up. Then he swung it directly before their eyes; still they crouched diffidently on their young, unsteady legs and gazed at the meat with curiosity but without any interest at all and fell again to moiling soundlessly among themselves.

“You can’t tell nothin’ about a dawg—” Jackson began. His father interrupted him.

“Now, watch.” He held the puppies with one hand and with the other he forced the meat into their mouths. Immediately they surged clumsily and eagerly over his hand, but he moved the meat away and at the length of the string he dragged it along the floor just ahead of them until they had attained asort of scrambling lope. Then in midfloor he flicked the meat slightly aside, but without seeing it the group blundered on and into a shadowy corner, where the wall stopped them and from which there rose presently the patient, voiceless confusion of them. Jackson left his chair and picked them up and brought them back to the fire.

“Now, what do you think of them, for a pack of huntin’ dogs?” the old man demanded. “Can’t smell, can’t bark, and damn ef I believe they kin see.”

“You can’t tell nothin’ about a dawg—” Jackson essayed patiently.

“Gen’ral kin,” his father interrupted. “Hyer, Rafe, call Gen’ral in hyer.”

Rafe went to the door and called, and presently General entered, his claws hissing a little on the bare floor and his ticked coat beaded with rain, and he stood and looked into the old man’s face with grave inquiry. “Corne hyer,”Mr. MacCallum said, and the dog moved again, with slow dignity. At that moment he saw the puppies beneath Jackson’s chair. He paused in midstride and for a moment he stood looking at them with fascination and bafflement and a sort of grave horror, then he gave his master one hurt, reproachful look and turned and departed, his tail between his legs. Mr. MacCallum sat down and rumbled heavily within himself.

“You can’t tell about dawgs—” Jackson repeated. He stooped and gathered up his charges, and stood up.

Mr. MacCallum continued to rumble and shake. “Well, I don’t blame the old feller,” he said. “Ef I had to look around on a passel of chaps like them and say to myself Them’s my boys—” But Jackson was gone. The old man sat and rumbled again, with enjoyment.

“Yes, suh, I reckon I’d feel ‘bout as proud as he does. Rafe, han’ me down my pipe.”

All that day it rained, and the following day and the day after that. The dogs lurked about the house all morning, underfoot, or made brief excursions into the weather, returning to sprawl before the fire, drowsing and malodorous and steaming, until Henry came along and drove them out; twice from the door Bayard saw the fox, Ethel, fading with brisk diffidence across the yard. With the exception of Henry and Jackson, who had a touch of rheumatism, the others were somewhere out in the rain most of the day. But at mealtimes they gathered again, shucking their wet outer garments on the porch and stamping in to thrust their muddy, smoking boots to the fire while Henry was fetching, the kettle and the jug. And last of all, Buddy, soaking wet.

Buddy had a way of getting his lean length up from his niche beside the chimney at any hour of the day and departing without a word, to return in an hour or six hours, or twelve or twenty-four or forty-eight, during which periods and despite the presence of Jackson and Henry and usually Lee, the place had a vague air of vacancy, until Bayard realized that the majority of the dogs were absent also. Hunting, they told Bayard when Buddy had been missingsince breakfast.

“Why didn’t he let me know?” he demanded.

“Maybe he thought you wouldn’t keen to be out in the weather,” Jackson suggested.

“Buddy don’t mind weather,” Henry explained. “One day’s like another to him.”

“Nothing ain’t anything to Buddy,” Lee put in, in his bitter, passionate voice. He sat brooding in thefire, his womanish hands moving restlessly on his knees. “He’s spent his whole life in that ‘ere river bottom, with a hunk of cold cawnbread to eat and a passel of dawgs fer comp’ny.” He rose abruptly and quitted the room. Lee was in the late thirties. As a child he had been sickly. He had a good tenor voice and lie was much in demand at Sunday singings. He was supposed to be keeping company with a young woman living in the hamlet of Mount Vernon, six miles away. Hespent much of his time tramping moodily and alone about the countryside.

Henry spat into the fire and jerked his head after tie departing brother. “He been to Vernon lately?”

“Him and Rale was there two days ago,” Jackson answered.

Bayard said; “Well, I won’t melt. I wonder if I could catch up with him now?” They pondered for a while, spitting gravely into the fire. “I misdoubt it,” Jackson said at last “Buddy’s liable to be ten mile away by now. You ketch ‘im next time ‘fo’ he starts out.”

After that Bayard did so, and he and Buddy tried for birds in the ragged, skeletoned fields in the rain, in which the guns made a flat, mournful sound that lingered in the streaming air like a spreading stain, or tried the stagnant backwaters along the river channel for duck and geese; ‘or, accompanied now and then by Rafe, hunted ‘coon and wildcat in the bottom. At times and far away, they would hear the shrill yapping of the young dogs in mad career. “There goes Ethel,” Buddy would remark. Then toward the end of the week the weather cleared, and in a twilight imminent with frost and while the scent lay well upon the muddy earth, old General started the red fox that had baffled him so many times.

All through the night the ringing, bell-like tonesquavered and swelled and echoed among the hills, and all of them save Henry followed on horseback, guided by the cries of the hounds but mostly by the old man’s and Buddy’s uncanny and seemingly clairvoyant skill, in anticipating the course of the race. Occasionally they stopped while Buddy and his father wrangled about where the quarry would head next, but usually they agreed, apparentlyanticipating the animal’s movements before it knew them itself; and once and again they halted their horses upon a hill and sat so in the frosty starlight until the dogs’ voices welled out of the darkness mournful and chiming, swelled louder and nearer and swept invisibly past not half a mile away; faded diminishing and with a falling suspense, as of bells, into the darkness again.

“Thar, now!” the old man exclaimed, shapeless in his overcoat, upon his white horse. “Ain’t that music feraman,now?”

“I hope they git ‘im this time,” Jackson said. “Hit hurts Gen’ral’s conceit so much everytime he fools ‘im.”

“They won’t git ‘im,” Buddy said. “Soon’s he gits tired, he’ll hole up in them rocks.”

“I reckon we’ll have to wait till them pups of Jackson’s gits big enough,” the old man agreed. “Unless they’ll refuse to run they own gran’pappy. They done refused ever’ tiling else excep’ vittles “

“You jest wait,” Jackson repeated, indefatigable. “When them puppies git old enough to—”

“Listen.”

The talking ceased, and again across the silence the dogs’ voices rang among the hills. Long, ringing cries fading, falling with a quavering suspense, like touched bells or strings, repeated and sustained by bell-like echoes repeated and dying among the darkhills beneath the stars, lingering yet in the ears crystal-clear, mournful and valiant and a little sad.

“Too bad Johnny ain’t here,” Stuart said quietly. “He’d enjoy this race.”

“He was a feller far huntin’, now,” Jackson agreed. “He’d keep up with Buddy, even.”

“John was a fine boy,” the old man said.

“Yes, suh,” Jackson repeated. “A right warmhearted boy. Henry says he never come out hyer withouten he brung Mandy and the boys a little sto’-bought somethin’.”

“He neve’ sulled on a hunt,” Stuart said. “No matter how cold and wet it was, even when he was a little chap, with that ‘ere single bar’lhe bought with his own money, that kicked ‘im so hard every time he shot it. And yit he’d tote it around, instead of that ‘ere sixteen old Colonel give ‘im, jest because he saved his money and bought hit hisself.”

“Yes,” Jackson agreed, “ef a feller gits into some-thin’ on his own accord, he ought to go through with hit cheerful.”

“He was sho’ a feller fer singin’ and shoutin’,”Mr. MacCallum said. “Skeer all the game in ten mile. I mind that night he headed off a race down at Samson’s bridge, and next we knowed, here him and the fox come a-floatin’ down river on that ‘ere drift lawg.”

“That ‘uz Johnny, all over,” Jackson agreed. “Gittin’ a whoppin’ big time outen ever’ thing that come up.”

“He was a fine boy,”Mr. MacCallum said again.

“Listen.”

Again the hounds gave tongue in the darkness below them. The sound floated up upon the chill air, died into echoes that repeated the sound again until its source was lost and the very earth itself mighthave found voice, mournful and sad and wild with all regret.

Christmas was two days away, and they sat again about the fire after supper; again old General dozed at his master’s feet. Tomorrow was Christmas eve and the wagon was going into town, and although, with that grave and unfailing hospitality of theirs, no word had been said to Bayard about his departure, he believed that in all their minds it was taken for granted that he would return home the following day for Christmas; and, since he had not mentioned it himself, a little curiosity and quiet speculation also.

It was cold again, with a vivid chill that caused the blazing logs to pop and crackle with vicious sparks and small glowing embers that leaped out upon the floor, to be crushed out by a lazy boot, and Bayard sat drowsily in a drowse of heat, his tired muscles relaxed in the cumulate waves of it as in a warm bath, and the stubborn struggling of his heart glozed over too, for the time. Time enough tomorrow to decide whether to go or not. Perhaps he’d just stay on, without offering that explanation that would never be demanded of him. Then he realized that Rafe, Lee, whoever went, would talk to people, would learn about that which he had not the courage to tell them.

Buddy had come out of his shadowy niche and he now squatted in the center of the. semicircle, his back to the fire and his arms around his knees, with his motionless and seemingly tireless ability for sitting timelessly on his heels. He was the baby, twenty years old. His mother was the old man’s second wife, and his hazel eyes and the reddish thatch cropped closely to his round head was a noticeable contrast to the others’ brown eyes and black hair. But the oldman had stamped Buddy’s face as clearly as ever a one of the other boys, and despite its youth, it too was like the others—aquiline and spare, reserved and grave though a trifle ruddy with his fresh coloring and finer skin.

The others were of medium height or under, ranging from Jackson’s faded, vaguely ineffectual lank-ness, through Henry’s placid rotundity and Rafe’s (Raphael Semmes he was) and Stuart’s poised and stocky muscularity, to Lee’s thin and fiery unrepose; but Buddy with his sapling-like leanness stood eye to eye with that father who wore his eighty-two years as though they were a thin shirt. “Long, spindlin’ scoundrel,” the old man would say, with bluff, assumed derogation. “Keeps hisself wore to a shadder totin’ around all that ‘ere grub he eats.” And they would sit in silence, looking at Buddy’s lean, jack-knifed length with the same identical thought, a thought which each believed peculiar to himself and which none ever divulged—that someday Buddy would marry and perpetuate the name.

Buddy also bore his father’s name, though it is doubtful if anyone outside the family and the War Department knew it. He had run away at eighteen and enlisted; at the infantry concentration camp in Arkansas to which he had been sent, a fellow recruit called him Virge and Buddy had fought him steadily and without anger for seven minutes; at the New Jersey embarkation depot another man had done the same thing, and Buddy had fought him, again steadily and thoroughly and without anger. In Europe, still following the deep but uncomplex compulsions of his nature, he had contrived, unwittingly perhaps, to perpetrate something which was later ascertained by authority to have severely annoyed the enemy, for which Buddy had received his charm, as he calledit. What it was he did, he could never be brought to tell, and the gaud not only failing to placate his father’s rage over the fact that a son of his had joined the Federal army, but on the contrary adding fuel to it, the bauble languished among Buddy’s sparse effects and his military career was never mentioned in the family circle; and now as usual Buddy squatted among them, his back to the fire and his arms around his knees^ while they sat about the hearth with their bedtime toddies, talking of Christmas.

“Turkey,” the old man was saying, with fine and rumbling disgust. “With a pen full of ‘possums, and a river bottom full of squir’ls and ducksand a smokehouse full of hawg meat, you damn boys have got to go clean to town and buy a turkey fer Christmas dinner.”

“Christmas ain’t Christmas lessen a feller has a little somethin’ different from ever’ day,” Jackson pointed out mildly.

“You boys jest wants a excuse to git to town and loaf around all day and spend money,” the old man retorted. “I’ve seen a sight mo’ Christmases than you have, boy, and ef hit’s got to be sto’-bought, hit ain’t Christmas.”

“How ‘bout town-folks?” Rafe asked. “You ain’t allowin’ them no Christmas a-tall.”

“Don’t deserve none,” the old man snapped. “Livin’ on a little two-by-fo’ lot, jam right up in the next feller’s back do’, eatin’outen tin cans.”

“Sposin’ they all broke up in town,” Stuart said, “and moved out here and took up land; you’d hear pappy cussin’ town then. You couldn’t git along without town to keep folks bottled up in, pappy, and you knows it.”

“Buyin’ turkeys,”Mr. MacCallum repeated with savage disgust. “Buyin’‘em. I mind the time when Icould take a gun and step out that ‘ere do’ and git a gobbler in thirty minutes. And a venison ham in a hour mo’. Why, you fellers don’t know nothin’ about Christmas. All you knows is a sto’ winder full of cocoanuts and Yankee-made popguns and sich.”

“Yes, suh,” Rafe said, and he winked at Bayard, “that was the biggest mistake the world ever made, when Lee surrendered. The country ain’t never got over it.”

The old man snorted again. “I’ll be damned ef I ain’t raised the damdest smartest set of boys in the world. Can’t tell ‘em nothin’, can’t learn ‘em nothin’; can’t even set in front of my own fire fer the whole passel of ‘em tellin’ me how to run the whole damn country. Hyer, you boys, git on to bed.”

Next morning Jackson and Rafe and Stuart and Lee left for town at sunup in the wagon. Still none of . them had made any sign, expressed any curiosity as to whether they would find him there when they returned that night, or whether it would be another three years before they saw him again. And Bayard stood on the frost-whitened porch, smoking a cigarette in the chill, vivid air while the yet hidden sun painted the eastern hills, and looked after the wagon and the four muffled figures in it and wondered if it would be three years again, or ever. The hounds came and nuzzled about him and he dropped his hand among their icy noses and the warm flicking of their tongues, gazing after the wagon, hidden now among the trees from which the dry rattling of it came unimpeded upon the soundless clear morning. “Ready to go?” Buddy said behind him, and he turned and picked up his shotgun where it leaned against the wall The hounds surged about them witheager whimperings and frosty breaths and Buddy led them across to a shed and huddled them inside and fastened the door upon their surprised protests. From another kennel he unfastened the young pointer, Dan. Behind them the hounds continued to raise their baffled and mellow expostulations.

Until noon they hunted the ragged, fallow fields and woods-edges in the warming am The frost was soon gone, and the air warmed to a windless languor; and twice in brier thickets they saw redbirds darting like arrows of scarlet flame. At last Bayard lifted his eyes unwinking into the sun.

“I must go back, Buddy,” he said. “Tin going home this afternoon.”

“All right,” Buddy agreed without protest, and he called the dog in. “You come back next month.”

Mandy got them some cold food and they ate, and while Buddy went to saddle Perry, Bayard went into the house where he found Henry laboriously soling fr pair of shoes and the old man reading a week-old . newspaper through steel-bowed spectacles.

“I reckon yo’ folks will be lookin’ fer you,”Mr. MacCallum agreed. “We’ll be expectin’ you back nest month, though, to git that ‘ere fox. Ef we don’t git ‘im soon, Gen’ral won’t be able to hold up his head befo’them puppies.”

“Yes, sir,” Bayard answered, “I will.”

“And try to git yo’ gran’pappy to come with you. He kin lay around hyer and eat his head off well as he kin in town.”

“Yes, sir, I will.”

Then Buddy led the pony up to the door, and the old man extended his hand without rising, and Henry put aside his cobbling and followed him onto the porch. “Come out again,” he said diffidently, giving Bayard’s hand a single pump-handle shake; andfrom a slobbering inquisitive surging of half-grown hounds Buddy reached up his hand

“Be lookin’ fer you,” he said briefly, and together they stood and watched Bayard wheel away, and when he looked back they lifted their hands gravely. Then Buddy shouted after him and he reined Perry about and returned. Henry had vanished, and he reappeared with a weighted tow sack.

“I nigh fergot it,” he said. “Jug of cawn pappy’s sendin’ in to yo’ gran’paw. You won’t git no better in Looeyvul or nowhar else, neither,” he added with quiet pride. Bayard thanked him, and Buddy fastened the sack to the pommel, where it lay solidly against his leg.

“There. That’ll ride. So long.”

“Solong.”

Perry moved on, and he looked back. They still stood there, quiet and grave and steadfast. Beside the kitchen door the fox, Ethel, sat, looking at him covertly; near her the half-grown puppies moved about in the sun. The sun was an hour above the western hills; the road wound on into the trees. He looked back again, the house sprawled its rambling length against the further trees, its smoke like a balanced plume against the windless sky. The door was empty again. He shook Perry into his easy, tireless foxtrot, the jug of whisky jouncing a little against his knee.

6

Where the dim, infrequent road to MacCallum’s left the main road, rising, he halted Perry and sat for a while in the sunset. Jefferson, 14 miles. Rafe and the other boys would not be along for some time, yet, what with Christmas eve in town and the slow festivegathering of the county. Still, they may have left town early, so as to get home by dark; might not be an hour away. The sun’s rays, slanting away, released the chill they had held prisoned in the ground during the perpendicular hours, and it rose slowly and gradually about him as he sat Perry in the middle of the road, and slowly his blood cooled with the cessation of Perry’s motion. He turned the pony’s back to town and shook him into his foxtrot again,

Darkness overtook him soon, but he rode on beneath the leafless trees, along the pale road in the gathering starlight Already Perry was thinking of stable and supper and he went on with tentative, inquiring tossings of his head, but obediently and without slackening his gait, knowing not where they were going nor why, save that it was away from home, and a little dubious, though trustfully. The chill grew in the silence and the loneliness and the monotony of their progress. He reined Perry to a halt and produced the jug and drank, and fastened the sack to the saddle again.

The hills rose wild and black about him; no sign of any habitation, no trace of man’s hand did they encounter. On all sides the hills rolled blackly away in the starlight, or when the road dipped into valleys where the ruts were already stiffening into iron-like shards that rattled beneath Perry’s hooves, they stood about him darkly towering and sinister, feathering their leafless branches against the spangled sky. Where a stream of winter seepage trickled across the road Perry’s feet crackled brittly in this ice, and Bayard slacked the reins while the pony snuffed at the water, and drank again from the jug.

He fumbled a match clumsily in his cold Angers and lit a cigarette, and pushed his sleeve back from his wrist 11:30. “Well, Perry,” his voice soundedloud and sudden in the stillness and darkness and the cold, “I reckon we better look for a place to hole up till morning.” Perry raised his head and snorted, as though he understood the words, as though he would enter the bleak loneliness in which his rider moved, if he could. They went on, mounting again.

The darknessspreadaway, lessening a little presently where occasional fields lay in the vague starlight, breaking the monotony of trees; and after a time during which he rode with the reins slack on Perry’s neck and his hands in his pockets seeking warmth between leather and groin, a cotton house squatted beside the road, its roof dusted over with a frosty sheen as of hushed silver. Not long, he said to himself, leaning forward and laying his hand on Perry’s neck, feeling the warm, tireless blood there. “House soon, Perry, if we look sharp.”

Again Perry whinnied alittle, as though he had understood, and presently he swerved from the road, and as Bayard reined him up he too saw the faint wagon trail leading away toward a low vague dump. of trees. “Good boy, Perry,” he said, slackening the reins again.

The house was a cabin. It was dark, but a hound came gauntly from beneath it and bayed at him and continued its uproar while he reined Perry to the door and knocked upon it with his numb hand. From within the house at last a voice, indistinguishable, and he repeated “Hello.” Then he added: ‘Tm lost. Open the door. “ The hound continued to bellow at him, and the door cracked upon a dying glow of embers, emitting a rank odor of negroes, and against the crack of warmth, a head.

“You, Jule,” the head commanded. “Shut yo’ mouf.” The hound ceased obediently and retired beneath the house, growling. “Who dar?”

“I’m lost,” Bayard repeated. “Can I sleep in your barn tonight?”

“Ain’t got no barn,” the negro answered. “Dey’s anudder house down de road a piece.”

“I’ll pay yon.” Bayard fumbled in his trousers with his numb hand. “My horse is tired out.” The negro’s head peered around the door, against the crack of firelight. “Come on, uncle,” Bayard added impatiently, “don’t keep a man standing in the cold.”

‘Who is you, whitefolks?”

“Bayard Sartoris, from Jefferson. Here,” and he extended his hand.

‘Banker Sartoris’s folks?”

“Yes. Here.”

“Wait a minute.” The door closed. But Bayard tightened the reins and Perry moved readily and circled the house confidently and went on among frost-stiffened cotton stalks that clattered drily about his knees. As Bayard dismounted onto frozen rutted earth beneath a gaping doorway, a lantern approached, swung low among the bitten stalks and the shadowy scissoring of the man’s legs, and he came up with a shapeless bundle under his arm and stood with the lantern while Bayard stripped the saddle and bridle off.

“How you manage to git so fur fum home dis time of night, whitefolks?” he asked curiously.

“Lost,” Bayard answered briefly. “Where can I put my horse?”

The negro swung the lantern into a stall. Perry stepped carefully over the sill and turned into the lantern light again, his eyes rolling in phosphorescent gleams; Bayard followed and rubbed him down with the dry side of the saddle blanket. The negro vanished and reappeared with a few ears of corn and dumped them into the manger beside Perry’s eagernuzzling. “You gwine be keerful about fire, ain’t you, boss?”

“Sure. I won’t strike any matches at all.”

“I got all my stock and tools and feed in here,” the negro explained. “I can’t affo’d to git burnt out. Insu’ance don’t reach dis fur.”

“Sure,” Bayard repeated. He shut Perry’s stall and drew the sack forth from where he had set it against the wall, and produced the jug. “Got a cup here?” The negro vanished again and Bayard could hear him in the crib in the wall opposite, then he emerged with a rusty can, from which he blew a bursting puff of chaff. They drank. Behind them Perry crunched his corn. The negro showed him the ladder to the loft.

“You won’t fergit about no fire, boss?” he repeated anxiously.

“Sure,” Bayard said. “Goodnight” He turned to mount. Again the negro stopped him and handed him the shapeless bundle he had brought out with him.

“Ain’t got but one to spare, but hit’ll help some. You gwine to sleep cole, tonight.” It was a quilt, ragged and filthy to the touch, and impregnated with that unmistakable odor of negroes.

“Thanks,” Bayard answered, “Much obliged to you. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, whitefolks.”

The lantern winked away, to the criss-crossing of the negro’s legs, and Bayard mounted into darkness and the dry, pungent scent of hay. Here, in the darkness, he made himself a bed of it and lay down and rolled himself into the quilt, filth and odor and all, and thrust his icy hands inside his shirt, against his flenching chest After a time and slowly his hands began to warm, tingling a little, but still his body lay shivering with weariness and with cold. Below himPerry munched steadily and peacefully in the darkness, and gradually the shaking of his body ceased. Before he slept he uncovered his arm and looked at the luminous dial on his wrist. One o’clock. It was already Christmas.

The sun waked him, falling in red bars through the cracks in the wall, and he lay for a time in his hard bed, with vivid chill upon his face like fresh city water, wondering where he was. Then he remembered, and moving, found that he was stiff with stale cold and that his blood moved through his arms and legs in small pellets like bird-shot. He dragged his legs from his odorous bed, but within his boots his feet were dead, and he sat flexing his knees and ankles for some time before his feet waked as with stinging needles. His movements were stiff and awkward, and he descended the ladder slowly and gingerly into the red sun that fell like a blare of trumpets into the hallway. The sun was just above the horizon, huge and red; and housetop, fenceposts, the casual farming tools rusting about the barnyard and the dead cotton stalks where the negro had farmed his land right up to his back door, were dusted over with frost which the sun changed to a scintillant rosy icing like that on a festive cake. Perry thrust his slender muzzle across the stall door and whinnied at his master with vaporous fading puffs of frosty breath, and Bayard spoke to him and touched his cold nose. Then he uncovered the jug again and. drank, and the negro with a milk pail appeared hi the doorway.

“Mawnin’ whitefolks. You g’awn to de house to de fire. I’ll feed yo’ hawss. De ole woman got yo’ breakfus’ ready.” He was eyeing the jug and Bayard gave him another drink and picked up the sack. Atthe well he stopped and drew a pail of icy water and splashed his face.

A fire burned on the broken hearth, amid ashes and charred wood-ends and a litter of cooking vessels. Bayard shut the door behind him, upon the bright cold, and warmth and rich, stale rankness enveloped him. A woman bent over the fire replied to his greeting diffidently. Three pickaninnies became utterly still in a corner and watched him with rolling white eyes. One of them was a girl in greasy, nondescript garments, her wool twisted into tight knots of soiled wisps of colored cloth. The second one might have been either or anything. The third one was practically helpless in a garment made from a man’s suit of wool underclothes. It was too small to walk and it crawled about the floor in a sort of intense purposelessness, a glazed path running from either nostril to its chin, as though snails had crawled there.

Without looking at him the woman placed a chair before the fire, and Bayard seated himself and thrust his boots to the blaze. “Had your Christmas dram yet, aunty?” he asked.

“Naw,suh.Ain’t got none, dis year.”

He swung the sack across his legs and set it on the floor. “Help yourself,” he said. “Plenty in there.” The three children squatted against the wall, watching him steadily, without movement and without sound. “Christmas come yet, chillen?” he asked them. But they only stared at him with the watchful gravity of animals until the woman returned and spoke to than in a chiding tone.

“Show de whitefolks yo’ Sandy Claus,” she prompted. “Thanky, suh,” she added, putting a tin plate on his lap and setting a cracked china cup on the hearth at his feet “Show ‘im,” she repeated.

“You want folks to think Sandy Claus don’t know whar you lives at?”

The children stirred then, and from the shadow behind them, where they had hidden them when he entered, they produced a small tin automobile, a string of colored wooden beads, a small mirror and a huge stick of peppermint candy to which trash adhered and which they immediately fell to licking gravely, turn and turn about. The woman filled the cup from the coffee pot set among the embers, and she uncovered an iron skillet and forked a thick slab of sizzling meat onto his plate, and raked a grayish object from the ashes and dusted it off and put that too on his plate. Bayard ate his side meat and hoecake and drank the thin, tasteless liquid. The children now played quietly with their Christmas, but from time to time he looked up and found them watching him again. Presently the man entered with his pail of milk.

“Ole ‘oman give you a snack?” he asked.

“Ye. What’s the nearest town on the railroad?” he inquired. The other told him—eight miles away. “Can you drive me over there this morning, and take my horse back to MacCallum’s some day this week?”

“My brudder-in-law bor’d my mules,” the negro answered readily. “I ain’t got but de one span, and he done bor’d dem.”

“I’ll pay you five dollars.”

The negro set thepail down, and the woman came and got it. He scratched his head slowly. “Five dollars,” Bayard repeated.

“You’s in a pow’ful rush, fer Chris’mus, white-folks.”

“Ten dollars;” Bayard said impatiently; “Can’t you get your mules from your brother-in-law?”

“I reckon so. I reckon he’ll bring ‘um back. By dinnertime. We kin go den.”

“Why can’t you get ‘em now? Take my horse and go get’em. I want to catch a train.”

“I ain’t had no Chris’mus yit, whitefolks. Feller workin’ ev’y day of de year wants a little Chris’mus.”

Bayard swore beneath his breath, but he said: “All right, then. After dinner. But you see your brother-in-law has’em back here in time.”

“He’ll be here: don’tyou worry about dat.”

“All right. You and aunty help yourselves to the jug.”

“Thanky,suh.”

The stale, airtight room dulled him; the warmth was insidious to his bones wearied and stiff after the chill night. The negroes moved about the single room, the woman busy at the hearth with her cooking, the pickaninnies with their frugal and sorry gewgaws and filthy candy. Bayard sat in his chair and dozed the morning away. Not asleep, but time was lost in a timeless region where he lingered unawake and into which he realized after a long while that something was trying to penetrate; watched the vain attempts with peaceful detachment. But at last it succeeded: a voice. “Dinner ready.”

The negroes drank with him again, amicably, a little diffidently—two opposed concepts antipathetic by race, blood, nature and environment, touching for a moment and fused within the illusion of a contradiction—humankind forgetting its lust and cowardice and greed for a day. Then dinner: ‘possum with yams, more gray ashcake, the dead and tasteless liquid in the coffee pot; a dozen bananas and jagged shards of cocoanut, the children crawling about his feet like animals scenting food. He realized that theywere holding back until he ate, but he overrode them; and at last (the mules having been miraculously returned by a yet incorporeal brother-in-law) with his depleted jug between his feet in the wagon bed, he looked once back at the cabin, with the woman standing in the door and a pale windless drift of smoke above its chimney.

Against the mules’ gaunt ribs the broken harness rattled and jingled. The air was warm, yet laced too with a thin distillation of chill that darkness would increase. The road went on across the bright land. From time to time across the shining sedge or from beyond brown and leafless woods, came the flat reports of guns; occasionally they passed other teams or horsemen or pedestrians, who lifted dark restful hands to the negro buttoned into an army overcoat, with brief covert glances for the white man on the seat beside him. “Heyo, Chris’mus!” Beyond the yellow sedge and the brown leafless ridges the ultimate hills stood bluely against the immaculate sky. “Heyo.”

They stopped and drank, and Bayard gave his companion a cigarette. The sun behind them now; no cloud, no wind in the serene pale cobalt. “Shawt days! Fo’ mile mo’. Come up, mules.” Between motionless willows, stubbornly green, a dry clatter of loose planks above water in murmurous flashes. The road lifted redly; pines stood against the sky. They crested this, and a plateau rolled away before them with its pattern of burnished sedge and fallow fields and brown woodland, and now and then a house, on into a shimmering azure haze, and low down on the horizon, smoke. “Two mile, now.” Behind them the sun was a balloon tethered an hour above the trees. They drank again.

It had touched the horizon when they lookeddown into the final valley where the railroad’s shining threads vanished among houses and trees, and along the air to them distantly, there came a slow, heavy explosion. “Still celebratin’,” the negro said.

They descended the finalhill, among houses, in the windows of which hung wreathes and paper bells, and whose stoops were littered with spent firecrackers; and went along streets where children in bright sweaters and jackets sped on shiny coasters and skates and wagons. Again a heavy explosion from the dusk ahead, and they debouched into the square with its Sabbath calm, littered too with shattered scraps of paper. It looked like that at home, he knew, with men and youths he had known from boyhood lounging the holiday away, drinking a little and shooting fireworks, giving nickels and dimes and quarters to negro boys who shouted Chris’mus gif! Chris’mus gif! as they passed; and after dark, somewhere a dance, with holly and mistletoe and paper streamers, and the girls he had always known with their new bracelets and watches and fans amid warmth and lights and music and glittering laughter. A small group stood on a corner, and as they passed and preceded by a sudden scurry among the group, yellow flame was stenciled abruptly on the twilight and the heavy explosion reverberated in sluggish echoes. The mules quickened against their collars and the wagon rattled on.

There were lights within the houses now, behind the wreathes and the rotund bells, and through the dusk voices called with mellow insistence; children’s voices replied, expostulant, reluctantly regretful. Then the station, where a bus and four or five cars stood aligned, and Bayard descended and the negro lifted down the sack.

“Much obliged,” Bayard said. “Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, whitefoiks.”

In the waiting room a stove glowed red hot and about the room stood cheerful groups, in sleek furs and overcoats, but he did not enter. He set the sack against the wall and tramped up and down the platform, warming his blood again. In both directions along the tracks green switch lights were steady in the dusk; a hands-breadth above the western trees the evening star was like an electric bulb. He tramped back and forth, glancing now and then into the ruddy windows, into the waiting room where the cheerful groups in their furs and overcoats gesticulated with festive though soundless animation, and into the colored waiting room, whose occupants sat patiently and murmurously about the stove in the dingy light As he turned here a voice spoke diffidently from the shadow beside the door. “Chris’mus gif, boss.” He took a coin from his pocket, and went on. Again from the square a firecracker exploded heavily, and above the trees a rocket arced, hung for a moment, then opened like a closed fist, spreading its golden and fading fingers upon the serene indigo sky without a sound.

Then the train came and brought its lighted windows to a jarring halt, and he picked up his sack again. And in the midst of a cheerful throng shouting goodbyes and holiday greetings to one another, he got aboard, unshaven, in his scarred boots and stained khaki pants, and his shabby, smoke-colored tweed jacket and his disreputable felt hat, and found a vacant seat and stowed the jug away beneath his legs.

FIVE

1

“...and since the essence of spring is loneliness and a little sadness and a sense of mild frustration, I suppose you do get a keener purifaction when a little nostalgia is thrown in for good measure. At home I always found myself remembering apple trees or green lanes or the color of the sea in other places, and I’d be sad that I couldn’t be everywhere at once, or that all the spring couldn’t be concentrated in one place, like Byron’s ladies’ mouths. But now I seem to be unified and projected upon one single and very definite object, which is something to be said for me, after all.” Horace’s pen ceased and he gazed at the sheet scrawled over with his practically illegible script, while the words he had just written echoed yet in his mind with a little gallant and whimsical sadness, and for the time being he had quitted the desk and the room and the town and all the crude and blatant newness into which his destiny had brought him, and again that wild and delicate futility of his roamed unchallenged through the lonely region into which it had at last concentrated its conflicting parts. Already the thick cables along the veranda eaves would be budding into small lilac matchpoints, and with no effort at all he could see the lawn below the cedars, splashed with randomnarcissi among random fading jonquils and gladioli waiting to bloom in turn.

But his body sat motionless, its hand with the arrested pen upon the scrawled sheet, the paper lying upon the yellow varnished surface of his new desk. The chair in which he sat was new too, as was the room with its dead white walls and imitation oak woodwork. All day long the sun fell upon it, untempered by any shade. In the days of early spring it had been pleasant, falling as it now did through his western window and across the desk where a white hyacinth bloomed in a bowl of glazed maroon pottery. But as he sat musing, staring out the window where, beyond a tarred roof that drank heat like a sponge and radiated it, against a brick wall a clump of ragged heaven trees lifted shabby, diffident bloom, he dreaded the long hot summer days of sunlight upon the roof directly above him, remembered his dim and musty office at home, in which a breeze seemed always to move, with its serried undisturbed rows of dusty books that seemed to emanate coolness and dimness even on the hottest days. And thinking of this, he was again lost from the harsh newness in which his body sat. The pen moved again.

“Perhaps fortitude is a sorry imitation of something worthwhile, after all To the So many who burrow along like moles in the dark, or like owls, to whom a candle-flame is a surfeit. But not those who carry peace along with them as the candle-flame carries light. I have always been ordered by words, but now it seems that I can even restore courage to my own cowardice by cozening it a little. I daresay you cannot read this as usual, or reading it, it will not mean anything to you. But you will have served your purpose anyway, thou still unravished bride of quietude.” Thou wast happier in thy cage, happier? Horace thought, looking at the words he had written and in which, as usual, he was washing one woman’s linen in the house of another. A thin breeze blew suddenly into the room; there was locust upon it, faintly sweet, and beneath it the paper stirred upon the desk, rousing him; and suddenly, as a man waking, he looked at his watch and replaced it and wrote rapidly:

“We are very glad to have little Belle with us. She likes it here: there is a whole family of little girls near door: stair steps of tow pigtails before whom it must be confessed that little Belle preens just a little; patronizes them. Children make all the difference in the world about a house. Too bad agents are not wise enough to supply rented houses with them. Particularly one like little Belle, so grave and shining and sort of irrelevantly and intensely mature, you know. But then, you don’t know her very well, do you? But we both are very glad to have her with us. I believe that Harry—” The pen ceased, and still poised, he sought the words that so rarely eluded him, realizing as he did so that, though one can lie about others with ready and extemporaneous promptitude, to lie about oneself requires deliberation and a careful choice of expression; Then he glanced again at his watch and scratched that out and wrote: “Belle sends love, O Serene.” and blotted it and folded it swiftly into an envelope and addressed and stamped it, and rose and took his hat.

Thou wast happier in thy cage, happier...The corridor, with its rubber mat and identical closed doors expensively and importantly discreet; the stairway with its brass-bound steps and at each turning, a heavy brass receptacle in which cigarette butts and scraps of paper reposed upon tobacco-stained sand, all new, all smelling of recent varnish. There was afoyer of imitation oak and imitation marble; the street in an untempered glare of spring sunlight. The building too was new and an imitation of something else, or maybe a skillful and even more durable imitation of that, as was the whole town, the very spirit, the essence of which was crystallized in the courthouse building—an edifice imposing as a theatre drop, flamboyant and cheap and shoddy; obviously built without any definite plan by men without honesty or taste. It was a standing joke that it had cost $60,000, and the people who had paid for it retailed the story without anger, but on the contrary with a little frankly envious admiration.

Ten years ago the town was a hamlet, twelve miles from the railroad. Then a hardwood lumber concern had bought up the cypress swamps nearby and established a factory in the town. It was financed by eastern capital and operated by as plausible and affable a set of brigands as ever stole a county. They robbed the stockholders and the timber owners and one another and spent the money among the local merchants, who promptly caught the enthusiasm, and presently widows and orphans in New York and New England were buying Stutz cars and imported caviar and silk dresses and diamond watches at three prices, and the town bootleggers and the moonshiners in the adjacent swamps waxed rich, and every fourth year the sheriff’s office sold at public auction for the price of a Hollywood bungalow. People in the neighboring counties learned of all this and moved there and chopped all the trees down and built themselves mile after mile of identical frame houses with garage to match: the very air smelled of affluence and burning gasoline. Yes, there was money there, how much no two estimates ever agreed; whose, at any one given time, God Himselfcould not have said. But it was there, like that afflatus of rank fecundity above a foul and stagnant pool on which bugs dart spawning, die, are replaced in mid-darting; in the air, in men’s voices and gestures, seemingly to be had for the taking. That was why Belle had chosen it.

But for the time being Horace was utterly oblivious of its tarnished fury as he walked along the street toward the new, ugly yellow station, carrying his letter the words of which yet echoed derisively in his mind … Belle sends love … Belle sends love. He had made acquaintances “In spite of yourself,” Belle told him harshly. “Thinking you are better than other people.” Yes, he had answered. Yes, with a weariness too spent to argue with its own sense of integrity. But he had made a few, some of whom he now passed, was greeted, replied: merchants, another lawyer, his barber; a young man who was trying to sell him an automobile. Naturally Belle would … Belle sendslove … Belle sends … He still carried his letter in his hand and glancing at the bulletin board on the station wall he saw that the train was a little late, and he went on down the platform to where the mail car would stop and gave the letter to the mail carrier—a lank, goose-necked man with a huge pistol strapped to his thigh … Thou wast happier … The express agent came along, dragging his truck … in thy cage, happier …“Got another ‘un today?” he asked, greeting Horace.

“What?” Horace said. “Oh, good afternoon.”

“Got another ‘un today?” the other repeated.

“Yes,” Horace answered, watching the other swing the truck skillfully into position beside the rails Happier The sun was warm; already there was something of summer’s rankness. in it—a quality which, at home where among green and ancient treesand graver and more constant surroundings, dwelt quietude and the soul’s annealment, it had not even in July. Soon, soon, he said, and again he went voyaging alone from where his body leaned against a strange wall in a brief hiatus of the new harsh compulsions it now suffered This will not last always: I have made too little effort to change my fellow man’s actions and beliefs to have won a place in anyone’s plan of infinity In thy cage, happier?

The locomotive slid past, rousing him: he had not heard it, and the cars on rasping wheels! and from the door of the express car the cleric with a pencil stuck jauntily beneath his cap, flipped his hand at him. “Here you are, Professor,” he said, handing down first to the agent a small wooden crate from which moisture dripped. “Smelling a little stout, today, but the fish won’t mind that, will they?” Horace approached, his nostrils tightening a little. The clerk in the car door was watching him with friendly curiosity. “Say,” he asked, “what kind of city fish you got around here, that have to have mail-order bait?”

“It’s shrimp,” Horace explained

“Shrimp?” the other repeated, “Eat ‘em yourself, do you?” he asked with interest.

“Yes.Mywife’sveryfondofthem.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the clerk said heartily. “Ithought it was some kind of patent fish-bait youwere getting every Tuesday. Well, every man to histaste, I reckon. But I’ll take steak, myself. All right,Bud; grab it”

Horace signed the agent’s receipt and lifted the crate from the truck, holding it carefully away from himself. The smell invariably roused in him a faint but definite repulsion which he was not able to overcome, though Belle preferred shrimp above all foods. And it always seemed to him for hours afterwardthat the smell clung about his clothing, despite the fact that he knew better, knew that he had carried the package well clear of himself. He carried it so now, his elbow against-his side and his forearm at a slight, tense angle with the dripping weight.

Behind him the bell rang, and with the bitten, deep snorts of starting, the train moved. He looked back and saw the cars slide past, gaining speed, carrying his letter away and the quiet, the intimacy the writing and the touching of it, had brought him. But day after tomorrow he could write again … Belle sends love … Belle sends … Ah, well, we all respond to strings. And She would understand, it and the necessity for it, the dreadful need; She in her serene aloofness partaking of gods … Belle sends

The street from curb to curb was uptorn. It was in the throes of being paved. Along it lines of negroes labored with pick and shovel, swinging their tools in a languid rhythm, steadily and with a lazy unhaste that seemed to spend itself in snatches of plaintive minor chanting punctuated by short grunting ejaculations which (tied upon the sunny air and ebbed away from the languid rhythm of picks that struck not; shovels that did not dig. Further up the street a huge misshapen machine like an antediluvian nightmare clattered and groaned. It dominated the scene with its noisy and measured fury, but against this as against a heroic frieze, the negroes labored on, their chanting and their motions more soporific than a measured tolling of faraway bells.

His arm was becoming numb, but the first mark— a water plug—where he changed hands for the first time, was still a hundred yards away; and when he reached it and swapped the crate to the other hand, his fingers were dead of all sensation and his biceps was jumping a little within his sleeve. Which goes toprove the fallacy of all theories of physical training. According to that, every succeeding Tuesday he should be able to go a littlefurther without changing, until by Christmas he would be able to carry the package all the way home without changing hands; and by Christmas ten years, all the way back to Gulfport, where they came from. Prize, maybe. More letters behind his name, anyway, C.S. Carrier of Shrimp. H. Benbow, M.A., Ll.D., C.S. … Thou wast happier …

The next mark was the corner where he turned, and he went on along the treeless street, between smug rows of houses identical one with another. Cheap frame houses, patently new, each with a garage and a car, usually a car that cost as much again as the house did. He reached the corner and changed hands again and turned into a smaller street, trailing spaced drops of melting ice behind him.

He lived on this street, and it was still open: motors could run on it, and he went on, dripping his trailing moisture along the sidewalk. With a motor car now, he could have ? Soon; perhaps next year; then things But naturally Belle would miss her car, after having had one always, a new one every year. Harry, and his passion for shiny wheels … which some would call generosity…“You lied to me. You told me you had plenty of money”… Lied …Lied took me away from my … Well, it would be better now, with little Belle. And Harry would find who functioned in movie subtitles, harshly: “What else do you want of mine? My damn blood?”

Man’s life. No apparent explanation for it save as an opportunity for doing things he’d spend the rest of it not being very proud of. Well, she had her child again, anyway, he told himself, thinking how women never forgive the men who permit them to do thethings which they later have any cause to regret; and remembering that day when, with little Belle’s awkwardly packed suitcase in the rack overhead and little Belle primly beside him in a state of demure and shining excitement at the prospect of moving suddenly to a new town, he had shrank into his corner like a felon until the familiar station and that picture of Harry’s ugly dogged head and his eyes like those of a stricken ox, were left behind, he wondered if little Belle too would someday ... But that last picture of Harry’s face had a way of returning. It’s only injured vanity, he argued with himself; he’s hurt in his own estimation because he couldn’t keep the female he had chosen in the world’s sight. But still his eyes and their patient bloodshot bewilderment, to be exorcised somehow. He’s a fool, anyway, he told himself savagely. And who has time to pity fools? Then he said God help us … God help us all … and then at last humor saved him and lie thought with a fine whimsical flash of it that probably Belle would send him to Harry next for a motor car.

Man’s very tragedies flout him. He has invented a masque for tragedy, given it the austerity which he believes the spectacle of himself warrants, and the thing makes faces behind his back; dead alone, he is not ridiculous, and even then only in his own eyes… Thou wast happier … A voice piped with thin familiarity from beyond a fence. It was little Belle playing with the little girls next door, to whom she had already divulged with thebland naiveté of children that Horace was not her real daddy: he was just the one that lived with them how, because her real daddy’s name was Daddy and he lived in another town. It was a prettier town than, this, while the little girls listened with respect coldly concealed: little Belle had gained a sort of grudging cosmopolitanish glamor, what with her uniquely diversified family.

At the next gate he paused, and opened it and entered his rented lawn where his rented garage stared its empty door at him like an accusing eye, and still carrying his package carefully away from him he went on between the two spindling poplars he had set out and approached his rented frame house with its yellow paint and its naked veranda, knowing that from behind a shade somewhere, Belle was watching him. In negligee, the heavy mass of her hair caught up with studied carelessness, and her hot, suspicious eyesand the rich and sullen discontent of her mouth … Lied … Lied … took me away from my husband: what is to keep … The wild bronze flame of her hair … Her Injury, yes. Inexcusable because of the utter lack of necessity or reason for it. Giving him nothing, taking nothing away from him. Obscene. Yes, obscene: a deliberate breaking of the rhythm of things for no reason; to both Belle and himself an insult; to Narcissa, in her home where her serenity lingered grave and constant and steadfast as a diffused and sourceless light, it was an adolescent scribbling on the walls of a temple. Reason in itself confounded … If what parts can so remain...“I didn’t lie. I told you; did what she would not have had the cowardice to do.” What is to keep … Ay, obscene if you will, but there was about her a sort of gallantry, like a swordsman who asks no quarter and gives none; slays or is slain with a fine gesture or no gesture at all; tragic and austere and fine, with the wild bronze flame of her hair. And he, he not only hadn’t made a good battle; he hadn’t even made a decent ghost. Thou wast happier in thy cage, happier? Nor oceans and seas...

“She had ghosts in her bed,” Horace said, mountingthe steps.

In January his aunt received a post card from Bayard mailed at Tampico; a month later, from Mexico City, a wire for money. And that was the last intimation he gave that he contemplated being at any stated place long enough for a communication to reach him, although from time to time he indicated by gaudy postals where he had been, after the bleak and brutal way of him. In April the card came from Rio, followed by an interval during which he seemed to have completely vanished and which Miss Jenny and Narcissa passed quietly at home, their days centered placidly about the expected child, which Miss Jenny had already named John. Miss Jenny felt that old Bayard had somehow flouted them all, had committed lese majesty toward his ancestors and the lusty glamor of the family doom by dying, as she put it, practically from the “inside put.” Thus he was in something like bad odor with her, and asyoung Bayard was in more or less suspense, neither flesh nor fowl, she fell to talking more and more of John, Soon after old Bayard’s death, in a sudden burst of rummaging and prowling which she called winter cleaning, she had found among his mother’s relics a miniature of John done by a New Orleans painter when John and Bayard were about eight Miss Jenny remembered that there had been one of each and it seemed to her that she could remember putting them both away together when their mother died. But the other she could not find. So she left Simon to gather up the litter she had made and brought the miniature downstairs to where Narcissa sat in the “office” and together they examined it.

The hair even at that early time was of a rich tawny shade, and rather long, “I remember that first day,” Miss Jenny said, “when they came home from school Bloody as hogs, both of ‘em, from fighting other boys who said they looked like girls. Their mother washed ‘em and petted ‘em, but they were so busy bragging to Simon and Bayard about the slaughter they had done to mind it much. ‘You ought to seen the otters,’ Johnny kept saying. Bayard blew up, of course; said it was a damn shame to send a boy out with, curls down his back, and finally he bullied the poor woman into agreeing to let Simon barber ‘em. And do you know what? Neither of ‘em would let his hair be touched. It seems they hadn’t licked all the enemy yet, and they were going to make the whole school admit that they could wear hair down to their heels, if they wanted to. And I reckon they did, because after two or three days there wasn’t any more blood on ‘em, and then they let Simon cut it off while their mother sat behind the piano in the parlor and cried. And that was the last of it.”

The face was a child’s face, and it was Bayard’s too, yet there was already in it, not that bleak arrogance she had come to know in Bayard’s, but a sort of frank spontaneity, warm and ready and generous; and as Narcissa held the $mall oval in her hand while the steady blue eyes looked quietly back at her and from the whole face among its tawny curls, with its smooth skin and child’s mouth, there shone like a serene radiance something sweet and merry and wild, she realized as she never had before the blind tragedy of human events. And while she sat motionless with the medallion in her hand and Miss Jenny thought she was looking at it, she was cherishing the child under her own heart with all the aroused constancy of her nature: it was as though already shecould discern the dark silver shape of that doomwhich she had incurred, standing beside her chair,waiting and biding its time. No, no she whisperedwith passionate protest, surrounding her child withwave after wave of that strength which welledsoabundantly within her as the days accumulated,manning the walls with invincible garrisons. She waseven glad Miss Jenny had shown her the thing: she was now forewarned as well as forearmed.

Meanwhile Miss Jenny continued to talk about the child as Johnny and to recall anecdotes of that other John’s childhood, until at last Narcissa realized that Miss Jenny was getting the two confused; and with a sort of shock she knew that Miss Jenny was getting old, that at last even her indomitable old heart was growing a little tired. It was a shock, for she had never associated senility with Miss Jenny, who was so spare and erect and brusque and uncompromising and kind, looking after the place which was not hers and to which she had been transplanted when her own alien roots in a faraway place where customs and manners and even the very climate were different, had been severedviolently; running it with tireless efficiency and with the assistance of only a doddering old negro as irresponsible as a child.

But run the place she did, just as though old Bayard and young Bayard were there. But at night when they sat before tie fire in the office as the year drew on and the night air drifted in heavy again with locust and with the song of mockingbirds and with all the renewed and timeless mischief of spring and at last even Miss Jenny admitted that they no longer needed a fire; when at these times she talked, Narcissa noticed that she no; longer talked of her far off girlhood and of Jeb Stuart with his crimson sash and his garlanded bay and his mandolin, but always of atime no further back than Bayard’s and John’s childhood, as though her life were closing, not into the future, but out of the past, like a spool being rewound.

And as she would sit, serene again behind her forewarned and forearmed bastions, listening, she admired more than ever that indomitable spirit which, born with a woman’s body into a heritage of rash and heedless men and seemingly for the sole purpose of cherishing those men to their early and violent ends, and this over a period of history which had seen brothers and husband slain in the same useless mischancing of human affairs, had seen the foundations of her life vanish as in a nightmare not to be healed by either waking or sleep from the soil where her forbears slept trusting in the integrity of mankind, and had had her own roots torn bodily and violently from that soil—a period at which the men themselves, for all their headlong and scornful rashness, would have quailed had their parts been passive parts and their doom been waiting. And she thought how much finer that gallantry which never lowered lance to foes no sword could ever find, that uncomplaining steadfastness of those unsung (ay, unwept, too) women than the fustian and’ useless glamor of the men that theirs was hidden by. And now she is trying to make me one of them; to make of my child just another rocket to glare for a moment in the shy, then dieaway.

But she was serene again, and her days centered more and more as thetime drew nearer, and Miss Jenny’s voice was only a sound, comforting but without significance. Each week she got a whimsical, gallantly humorous letter from Horace: these she read too with serene detachment—what she could decipher, that is. She had always found Horace’swriting difficult, and parts that she could decipher meant nothing. Brit she knew that he expected that.

Then it was definitely spring again. Miss Jenny’s and Isom’s annual vernal altercation began, continued its violent but harmless course in the garden. They brought the tulip bulbs up from the cellar and set them out, Narcissa helping, and spaded up the other beds and unswaddled the roses and the transplanted jasmine. Narcissadrove into town, saw the first jonquils on the now deserted lawn, blooming as though she and Horace were still there, and later, the narcissi. But when the gladioli bloomed she was not going out any more save in the late afternoon or early evening, when she and Miss Jenny walked in the garden among burgeoning bloom and mockingbirds and belated thrushes where the long avenues of gloaming sunlight reluctant leaned, Miss Jenny still talking about Johnny; confusing the unborn with the dead.

Late in May they received a request for money from Bayard in San Francisco, where he had at last succeeded in being robbed. Miss Jenny sent it “You come on home “ she wired him, not telling Narcissa. “He’ll come home, now,” she did tell her. “You see if he don’t. If for nothing else than to worry us for a while.”

But a week later fie still had not come home, and Miss Jenny wired him again, a night letter, to the former address. But when the wire was dispatched he was in Chicago, and when it reached San Francisco he was sitting among saxophones and painted ladies and middle-aged husbands at a table littered with soiled glasses and stained with cigarette ash and spilt liquor, accompanied by a girl and two men. One of the men wore whipcord, with an army pilot’s silverwings on his. breast The other was a stocky man in shabby serge, with gray temples and intense, visionary eyes. The girl was a slim long thing, mostly legs apparently, with a bold red mouth and cold eyes, in an ultra-smart dancing frock; and when tile other two men crossed the room and spoke to Bayard she was cajoling him to drink with thinly concealed insistence. She and the aviator now danced together, and from time to time she looked back to where Bayard sat drinking steadily while the shabby man talked to him. She was saying: “Fm scared of him.”

The shabby man was talking with leashed excitability, using two napkins folded lengthwise into narrow strips to illustrate something, his voice hoarse and importunate against the meaningless pandemonium of the horns and drums. For. a while Bayard had half listened, staring at the man with his bleak chill eyes,but now he was watching something across the room, letting the man talk on, unminded. He was drinking whisky and soda steadily, with the bottle beside him. His hand was steady enough, but his face was dead white and he was quite drunk; and looking across at him from time to time, the girl was saying to her partner: “Tin scared, I tell you. God, I didn’t know what to do, when you and your friend came over. Promise you won’t go and leave us.”

“You seared?” the aviator repeated in a jeering tone, but he too glanced back at Bayard’s bleak arrogant face. “I bet you don’t even need a horse.”

“You don’t know him,” the girl rejoined, and she clutched his hand and struck her body shivering against his, and though his arm tightened and his hand slid down her back a little, it was under cover of the shuffling throng into which they were wedged, and a little warily, and he said quickly:

“Ease off, Sister: he’s looking this way. I saw himknock two teeth out of an Australian captain that just tried to speak to a girl he was with in a London joint two years ago.” They moved on until the band was across the room from them. “What’re you scared of? He’s not an Indian: he won’t hurt you as long as you mind your step. He’s all right. I’ve known him a long time, in places where you had to be good, believe me.”

“You don’t know,” she repeated, “I—” the music crashed to a stop; in the sudden silence the shabby man’s voice rose from the nearby table:

“—could just get one of these damn yellow-livered pilots to—” his voice was drowned again in a surge of noise, drunken voices and shrill woman-laughter and scraping chairs, but as they approached the table the shabby man still talked with leashed insistent gestures while Bayard stared across the room at whatever it was he watched, raising his glass steadily to his mouth. The girl clutched her partner’s arm.

“You’ve got to help me pass him out,” she begged swiftly. “I’m scared to leave with him, I tell you.”

“Pass Sartoris out? The man don’t wear hair, nor the woman either. Run back to kindergarten, Sister.” Then, struck with her sincerity, he said: “Say, what’s he done, anyway?”

“I don’t know. He’ll do anything. He threw an empty bottle at a traffic cop as we were driving out here. You’ve got—”

“Hush it,” he said. The shabby man ceased and raised his face impatiently. Bayard still gazed across the room.

“Brother-in-law over there,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully. “Don’t speak to family. Mad at us.” They turned and looked.

“Where?” the aviator asked. Then he beckoned a waiter. “Here, Jack.”

“Man with diamond headlight,” Bayard said, “Brave man. Can’t speak to him, though. Might hit me. Friendwith him, anyway.”

The aviator looked again. “Looks like his grandmother,” he said. He called the waiter again, then to the girl: “Another cocktail?” He picked up the bottle and filled his glass and reached it over and filled Bayard’s, and turned to the shabby man. “Where’s yours?”

The shabby man waved it impatiently aside. “Look.” He picked up the napkins again. “Dihedral increases in ratio to air speed, up to a certain point. Now, what I want to find out—“

“Tell it to the Marines, buddy,” the aviator interrupted. “I heard a couple of years ago they got a airyplane. Here, waiter!” Bayard was watching the shabby man bleakly.

“You aren’t drinking” the girl said. She touched the aviator beneath the table.

“No,” Bayard agreed.“Why don’t you fly his coffin for him, Monaghan?”

“Me?” The aviator set his glass down. “Like hell. My leave comes due next month.” He raised the glass again. “Here’s to wind-up,” he said. “And no heel-taps.”

“Yes,” Bayard agreed, not touching his glass. His face was pale and rigid, a metal mask again.

“I tell you there’s no danger at all, as long as you keep the speed below the point I’ll give you,” the shabby man said. “I’ve tested the wings with weights, and proved the lift and checked all my figures; all you have to do—”

“Won’t you drink with us?” the girl insisted.

“Sure he will,” the aviator said. “Say, you remember that night in Amiens when that big Irish devil, Comyn, wrecked the Cloche-Clos by blowing thatA.P.M.’s whistle at the door?” The shabby man sat smoothing the folded napkins on the table before him. Then he burst forth again, his voice hoarse and mad with the intensity of his frustrated dream:

“I’ve worked and slaved, and begged and borrowed, and now when I’ve got the machine and a government inspector, I can’t get a test because you damn yellow-livered pilots won’t take it up. A service full of you, drawing flying pay for sitting in two-story dancehalls, swilling alcohol. You overseas pilots talking about your guts! No wonder you couldn’t keep the Germans from—”

“Shut up,” Bayard told him without heat, in his bleak, careful voice.

“You’re not drinking,” the girl repeated, <4Won’t you?” She raised his glass and touched her lips to it and extended it to him. Taking it, he grasped her hand too and held her so. But again he was staring across the room. ‘

“Not brother-in-law,” he said. “Husband-in-law. No. Wife’s brother’s husband-in-law. Wife used to be wife’s brother’s girl. Married, now. Fat woman. He’s lucky.”

“What’re you talking about?” the aviator demanded. “Come on, let’s have a drink.”

The girl was taut at her arm’s length, with the other hand she raised her glass and she smiled at him with brief and terrified coquetry. But he held her wrist in his hard fingers, and while she stared at him widely he drew her steadily toward him. “Turn me loose,” she whispered. “Don’t,” and she set her glass down and with the other hand she tried to unclasp his fingers. The shabby man was brooding over his folded napkins; the aviator was carefully occupied with his drink. “Don’t,” she whispered again. Her body was wrung in her chair and she put her otherhand out quickly, lest she be dragged out of it, and for a moment they stared at one another—she with Wide and mute terror; he bleakly with the cruel cold mask of his face. Then he released her and rose and kicked his chair away.

“Come on, you,” he said to the shabby man. He drew a wad of bills from his pocket and laid one beside her on the table. ‘That’ll get you home,” he said. But she sat nursing the wrist he had held, watching him without a sound. The aviator was discreetly interested in the bottom of his glass. “Come on,” Bayard repeated, and he stalked steadily on. The shabby man rose and followed rapidly.

In a small alcove Harry Mitchell sat. On his table too were bottles and glasses, and he now sat slumped in his chair, his eyesclosed and his bald head in the glow of an electric candle was dewed with rosy perspiration. Beside him sat a woman who turned and looked full at Bayard with an expression of harried desperation; above them stood a waiter with a head like that of a priest, and as Bayard passed he saw that the diamond was missing from Harry’s tie and he heard their bitter suppressed voices as their hands struggled over something on the table between them, behind the discreet shelter of their backs, and as he and his companion reached the door the woman’s voice rose with a burst of filthy rage into a shrill hysterical scream cut sharply off, as if someone had clapped a hand over her mouth.

* * *

The next day Miss Jenny drove in to town and wired him again. But when this wire was dispatched, Bayard was sitting in an aeroplane on the tarmac of the government field at Dayton, while the shabby man hovered and darted hysterically about and a group ofarmy pilots stood nearby, politely noncommittal The machine looked like any other bi-plane, save that there were no viable cables between the planes, which were braced from within by wires on a system of tension springs; and hence, motionless on the ground, dihedral was negative. The theory was that while in level flight dihedral would be eliminated for the sake of speed, as in the Spad type, and when the machine was banked, side pressure would automatically increase dihedral for maneuverability. The cockpit was set well back toward the fin. “So you can see the wings when they buckle,” the man who loaned him a helmet and goggles said drily. “It’s an old pair,” he added. But Bayard only glanced at him, bleakly humorless. “Look here, Sartoris,” the man added, “let that crate alone. These birds show up here every week with something that will revolutionize flying, some new kind of mantrap that flies fine—on paper. If the C.O. won’t give him a pilot (and you know we try anything here that has a prop on it) you can gamble it’s a washout.”

But Bayard took the helmet and goggles and went on across the aerodrome toward the hangar. The group followed him and stood quietly about with their bleak, wind-gnawed faces while the engine was being warmed up. But when Bayard got in and settled his goggles, the man approached and thrust his hand into Bayard’s lap. “Here,” he said brusquely. “Take this.” It was a woman’s garter, and Bayard picked it up and returned it.

“I won’t need it,” he said. “Thanks just the same.”

“Well, you know your own business, of course. But if you ever let her get her nose down, you’ll lose everything but the wheels.”

“I know,” Bayard answered. “I’ll keep her up.”The shabby man rushed up again, still talking. “Yes,yes,” Bayard replied impatiently, “You told me allthat Contact,” he snapped. The mechanic spun thepropeller over, and as the machine moved out theshabby man still clung to the cockpit and shouted athim. Soon he was running to keep up and still shouting, until Bayard lifted his hand off the cowling andopened the throttle. But when he reached the end ofthe field and turned back into the wind the man wasrunning toward him and waving his arms. Bayard

opened the throttle full and the machine lurched for ward and when he passed the shabby man in midfielddie tail was high and the plane rushed on in longbounds, and he had a fleeting glimpse of the man’sopen mouth and his wild arms as the boundingceased.

There was not enough tension on the wires, he decided at once, watching them from the V strut out as they tipped and swayed, and he jockeyed the thing carefully on, gaining height. Also he realized that there was a certain point beyond which his own speed would rob him of lifting surface. He had about two thousand feet now, and he turned, and in doing so he found that aileron pressure utterly negatived the inner plane’s dihedral and doubled the outer one, and he found himself in the wildest skid he had seen since his Hun days. The machine not only skidded: it flung its tail up like a diving whale and the air speed indicator leaped thirty miles past the dead line the inventor had given him. He was headed back toward the field now, in a shallow dive,and he pulled the stick back.

But only the wingtips responded by tipping sharply upward; he flung the stick forward before they ripped completely off, and he knew that only the speed of the dive kept him from falling like an inside out umbrella. And the speed was increasing: itseemed an eternity before the wingtips recovered, and already he had overshot the field, under a thousand feet high. He pulled the stick back again; again the wingtips buckled and he slapped the stick, over and kicked again into that skid, trying to, check his speed. Again the machine swung its tail in a soaring arc, but this time the wings came off and he ducked his head automatically as one of them slapped viciously past it and crashed into the tail, shearing it too away.

3

That day Narcissa’s child was born, and the following day Simon drove Miss Jenny in to town and set her down before the telegraph office and held the horses leashed and champing with gallant restiveness by a slight and surreptitious tightening of the reins, while beneath the tilted tophat and the voluminous duster, he swaggered, sitting down. Though he was sitting and you would not have thought it possible, Simon contrived by some means to actually strut. So Dr. Peabody found him when he came along the street in the June sunlight, in his slovenly alpaca coat, carrying a newspaper.

“You look like a frog, Simon,” he said, ‘Where’s Miss Jenny?”

“Yessuh,” Simon agreed. “Yessuh. Dey’s swellin’ en rejoicin’ now. De little marster done’arrive. Yessuh, de little marster done arrive’ and de ole times comin’ back.”

“Where’s Miss Jenny?”Dr. Peabody repeated impatiently.

“She in dar, tellygraftin’ dat boy ter come on back byer whar he belong at.”Dr. Peabody turned awayand Simon watched him, a little fretted at his apathy in the face of the event. “Takes it jes’ like trash,” Simon mused aloud, with annoyed disparagement. “Nummine; we gwine wake ‘um all up, now; Yessuh, de olden times comin’ back again, sho’. Like in Marse John’s time, when de Cunnel wuz de young marster en de niggers fum de quawtuhs gethered on de front lawn, wishin’ Mistis en de little marster well.” And he watched Dr. Feabody enter the door and through the plate glass window he saw him approach Miss Jenny as she stood at the counter with her message.

“Come home you fool and see your family or I will have you arrested” the message read in her firm, lucid script. “It’s more than ten words,” she told the operator, “but that don’t matter this time. He’ll come now: you watch. Or I’ll send the sheriff after him, sure as his name’s Sartoris.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the operator said. He was apparently having trouble reading it, and he looked up after a time and was about to speak when Miss Jenny remarked his distraction and repeated the message briskly.

“And make it stronger than that if you want to,” she added.

“Yes, ma’am,” the operator said again, and he ducked down behind his desk, and presently and with a little mounting curiosity and impatience Miss Jenny leaned across the counter with a silver dollar in her fingers and watched him count the words three times in a sort of painful flurry;

“What’s the matter, young man?” she demanded. “The government don’t forbid the mentioning of a day-old child in a telegram, does it?”

The operator looked up. “Yes, ma’am, it’s all right,” he said at last, and she gave him the dollar, and as he sat holding it and Miss Jenny watched himwith yet more impatience.Dr. Peabody came in and touched her arm.

“Come away, Jenny,” he said.

“Good morning,” she said, taming at his voice. ‘Well, ifs about time you took notice. This is the first Sartoris you’ve been a day late on in how many years, Loosh? And soon’sI get that fool boy home, it’ll be like old times again, as Simon says.”

“Yes. Simon told me. Come away.”

“Let me get my change.” She turned to the operator, who stood with the yellow sheet in one hand and the coin in the other. “Well, young man? Ain’t a dollar enough?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he repeated, turning upon Dr. Peabody his dumb, distracted eyes. Dr. Peabody reached fatly andtook the message and the coin from him.

“Come away, Jenny,” he said again.

Miss Jenny stood motionless for a moment, in her black silk dress and her black bonnet set squarely on her head, staring at him with her piercing old eyes that saw so much and so truly. Thensheturned and walked steadily to the door and stepped into the street and waited until he joined her, and her hand was steady too as she took the folded paper he offered. Mississippi boy it said in discreet capitals, and she returned it to him immediately and from her waist she took a small sheer handkerchief and wiped her fingers lightly.

“I don’t have to read it,” she said. “They never get into the papers but one way. And I know that he was somewhere he had no business being, doing something that wasn’t any affair of his.”

“Yes,”Dr. Peabody said. He followed her to the carriage and put his hands clumsily upon her as she mounted.

“Don’t paw me, Loosh,” she snapped. “I’m not acripple.” But he supported her elbow with his huge, gentle hand until she was seated, then he stood with his hat off while Simon laid the linen robe across her knees.

“Here,” he said, and extended her the silver dollar and she returned it to her bag and clicked it shut and wiped her fingers again on her handkerchief.

“Well,” she said, “thank God that’s the last one. For a while, anyway. Home, Simon.”

Simon sat with leashed magnificence, but under the occasion he unbent a little. “When you gwine come out en see de young marster, Doctuh?”

“Soon, Simon,” he answered; and Simon clucked to the horses and wheeled away with a flourish, his hat tilted and the whip caught smartly back. Dr. Peabody stood in the street, a shapeless hogshead of a man in a shabby alpaca coat, his hat in one hand and the folded newspaper and the yellow unsent message in the other, until Miss Jenny’s straight slender back and the squarely indomitable angle of her bonnet had passed from sight.

But that was not the last one. One morning a week later, Simon was found in a negro cabin in town, with his grizzled head crushed ir^ by a blunt instrument anonymously wielded.

“In whose house?” Miss Jenny demanded into the telephone. In that of a woman named Meloney Harris, the voice told her. Meloney...Mel...Belle Mitchell’s face flashed before her, and she remembered: the mulatto girl whose smart apron and cap and lean shining shanks had lent such an air to Belle’s parties, and who had quit Belle in order to set up a beauty parlor. Miss Jenny thanked the voice and hung up the receiver.

“The old gray-headed reprobate,” she said, and she went into the office and sat down. “So that’s what became of that church money he ‘put out,’ I wondered...” She sat stiffly and uncompromisingly erect in her chair, her hands idle on her lap. Well, that is the last one of ‘em, she said. But no, he was hardly a Sartoris: he had at least had some shadow of a reason, while the others … “I think,” Miss Jenny said, who had not spent a day in bed since she was forty years old, “that I’ll be sick for a while.”

And she did just exactly that. Went to bed, where she lay propped on pillows in a frivolous lace cap, and would permit no doctor to see her save Dr. Peabody who called once informally and who sat sheepishly andmountainously for thirty minutes while Miss Jenny vented her invalid’s spleen and the recurred anger of the salve fiasco upon him. And here she held daily councils with Isom and Elnora, and at the most unexpected times she would storm with unimpaired vigor from her window at Isom or Caspey in the yard beneath.

The child and the placid, gaily turbaned mountain who superintended his hours, spent most of the day in this room, and presently Narcissa herself; and the three of them would sit for rapt murmurous hours in a sort of choral debauch of abnegation while the object of it slept digesting, waked, stoked himself anew and slept again.

“He’s a Sartoris, all right,” Miss Jenny said, “but an improved model. He hasn’t got that wild look of ‘em. I believe it was the name. Bayard. We did well to name him Johnny.”

“Yes,” Narcissi said, watching her sleeping son with grave and tranquil serenity.

* * *

And there Miss Jenny staid until her while was up. Three weeks it was. She set the date before she went to bed and held to it stubbornly, refusing even to rise and attend the christening. That day fell on Sunday. It was late in June and jasmine drifted into the house in steady waves. Narcissa and the nurse, in an even more gaudy turban, had brought the baby, bathed and garnished and scented in his ceremonial robes, in to her, and later she heard them drive away, and the house was still again. The curtains stirred peacefully at the windows, and all the peaceful scents of summer came up on the sunny breeze, and sounds—birds, and somewhere a Sabbath bell, and Elnora’s voice, chastened a little with her recent bereavement but still rich and mellow as she went about getting dinner. She sang sadly and endlessly and without words as she moved about the kitchen, but she broke off short when she looked up and saw Miss Jenny looking a little frail but fully dressed and erect as ever, in the door.

“Miss Jenny! Whut in de worl’! You git on back to yo’ bed. Here,” and Elnora crossed the kitchen, but Miss Jenny came firmly on.

“Where’s isom?” she demanded.

“He atde barn. You come on back to bed. I’m gwine tell Miss Narcissa on you.”

“I’m tired staying in the house,” Miss Jenny stated. “I’m going to town. Call Isom.” Elnora protested still, but Miss Jenny insisted coldly, and Elnora called Isom from the door and returned, still portentous with pessimistic warnings, and presently Isom entered.

“Here,” Miss Jenny said, handing him the keys. “Get the car out.” Isom departed and Miss Jenny followed more slowly, and Elnora would have followed too, solicitous, but Miss Jenny drove her back to herkitchen; and unassisted she crossed the yard and got in beside Isohl “And you drive this thing careful, boy,” she told him, “or I’ll get over there and do it myself.”

When they reached town, from slender spires rising among trees against the puffy summer clouds, church bells rang lazily upon the ebbing Reaches of the sunny air. But at the edge of town Miss Jenny bade Isom turn into a narrow lane and they followed this and stopped presently before the iron gates to the cemetery. “I want to see if they fixed Simon all right,” she explained. “I’m not going to church today: I’ve been shut up between walls long enough.” Just from the prospect she got a mild exhilaration, like that of a small boy playing out of school

The negro ground lay beyond the cemetery proper and its orderly plots, and Isom led her to Simon’s grave. Simon’s burying society had taken care of him, and after two weeks the mound was still heaped with floral designs from which the blooms had fallen, leaving a rank, lean mass of stems and peacefully rusting wire skeletons. Elnora, someone, bad also been before her, and the grave was bordered with tedious rows of broken gaudy bits of crockery and of colored glass. “I reckon hell have to have a headstone, too,” Miss Jenny said aloud, and turning, saw Isom hauling his overalled legs into a tree, about which two catbirds whirled and darted in scolding circles. “You, Isom.”

“Yessum,” Isom answered and he dropped to the ground and the birds threatened him with a final burst of hysterical profanity, and followed her. They went on and into the white folks’ section and passed now between marble shapes bearing names that she knew well, and dates in a stark and peaceful simplicity in the impervious stone. Now and then they weresurmounted by symbolical urns and doves and surrounded by dipped tended sward green against the, blanched marble and the blue, dappled sky and the black cedars from among which doves crooned endlessly reiterant. Here and there bright unfaded flowers lay in random bursts against the pattern of green and white; and presently John Sartoris lifted his stone back and his fulsome gesture amid a clump of cedars beyond which the bluff sheered sharply away into the valley.

Bayard’s grave too was a shapeless mass of withered flowers, and Miss Jenny had Isom clear them off and carry them away. The masons were just beginning to lay the curbing around it, and the headstone itself sat nearby beneath a canvas cover. She lifted the cover and read the clean, new lettering: Bayard Sartoris. March 16, 1893—June 5, 1920. That was better. Simple: no Sartoris man to invent bombast to put on it. Can’t lie dead in the ground without strutting and swaggering. Beside the grave was a second headstone; like the other save for the inscription. But the Sartoris touch was there, despite the fact that there was no grave to accompany it, and the whole thing was like a boastful voice in an empty church. Yet withal there was something else, as though the merry wild spirit of him who had laughed away so much of his heritage of humorless and fustian vainglory, managed somehow even yet to soften the arrogant gesture with which they had said farewell:

LIEUT. JOHN SARTORIS, R.A.F.

Killed in action, July 19,1918.

‘I bare him on eagle’s wings

and brought him unto Me’

A faint breeze soughed in the cedars like a long sigh and the branches moved gravely in it. Across the spaced tranquility of the marble shapes the doves crooned their endless rising inflections. Isom retained for another armful of withered flowers and bore it away.

Old Bayard’s headstone was simple too, having been born, as he had, too late for one war and too soon for the next one, and she thought what a joke They had played on him: denying him opportunities for swashbuckling and then denying him the privilege of being buried by men who would have invented vainglory for him. The cedars had almost overgrown his son John’s and John’s wife’s, graves. Sunlight reached them only in fitful splashes, dappling the weathered stone with brief stipplings; only with difficulty could the inscription have been deciphered. But she knew what it would be, what with the virus, the inspiration and the example of that one which dominated them all, which gave to the whole place in which weary people were supposed to rest, a hushed, orotund solemnity having no more to do with mortality than the bindings of books have to do with that of the characters, and beneath which the headstones of the wives whom they had dragged into their arrogant orbits were, despite their pompous genealogical references, modest and effacing as the song of thrushes beneath the eyrie of an eagle.

He stood on a stone pedestal, in his frock coat and bareheaded, one leg slightly advanced and one hand resting lightly on the stone pylon beside him. His head was lifted a little in that gesture of haughty arrogance which repeated itself generation after generation with a fateful fidelity, his back to the world and his carven eyes gazing out across the valley where hisrailroad ran and beyond it to the blue changeless hills, and beyond that The pedestal and effigy were mottled with sessions of rain and sun and with drippings from the cedar branches, and the bold carving of the letters was bleared with mold, yet easily decipherable:

COLONEL JOHN SARTORIS, CSA

1823 - 1876

Soldier, Statesman, Citizen of the World

For marts enlightenment he lived

By man’s ingratitude he died

Pause here, son of sorrow; remember death.

This inscription had caused some furor on the part of the slayer’s family, and a formal protest followed. But in complying with opinion, old Bayard had his revenge: he caused the line ‘by man’s ingratitude he died’ to be chiseled crudely out and added beneath it: ‘Fell at the hand of—— Redlaw, Aug, 4, 1876.’

Miss Jenny stood for a time, musing, a slender, erect figure in black silk and a small uncompromising black bonnet. The wind drew among the cedars in long sighs, and steadily as pulses the sad hopeless reiteration of the doves came along the sunny air. Isom returned for the last armful of dead flowers, and looking out across the marble vistas where shadows of noon moved, she watched a group of children playing quietly and a little stiffly in their bright Sunday finery, among the tranquil dead. Well, it was the last one, at last, gathered in solemn conclave about the dying reverberation of their arrogant lusts, their dust moldering quietly beneath the pagan symbols oftheir vainglory and the carven gestures of it in enduring stone; and she .remembered something Narcissa had said once, about a world without men, and wondered if therein lay peaceful avenues and dwellings thatched with quiet; and she didn’t know.

Isom returned, and as she turned away Dr. Peabody called her name. He was dressed as usual in his shabby broadcloth trousers and his shiny alpaca coat and a floppy panama hat, and his son was with him.

“Well, boy,” Miss Jenny said, giving young Loosh her hand. His face was big-boned and roughly molded. He had a thatch of straight, stiff black hair and his eyes were steady and brown and his mouth was large; and in all his ugly face there was reliability and gentleness and humor. He was rawboned and he wore his clothing awkwardly, and his hands were large and bony and with them he performed delicate surgical operations with the deftness of a hunter skinning a squirrel and the celerity of a prestidigitator. He lived in New York, where he was associated with a surgeon whose name was a household word, and once a year and sometimes twice he rode thirty-six hours on the train, spent twenty hours with his father (which they passed walking about the town or riding over the countryside in the sagging buck-board all day, and sitting on the veranda or before the fire all the following night), took the train again and ninety-two hours later, was at his clinic again. He was thirty years old, only child of the woman Dr. Peabody had courted for fourteen years before he Was able to marry her. The courtship was during the days when he physicked and amputated the whole county by buckboard; often after a year’s separation he would drive thirty miles to see her, to be met on the way and deflected to a childbed or a mangledlimb, with only a scribbled message to assuage the interval of another year, “So you’re home again, are you?” Miss Jenny asked.

“Yes, ma’am. And find you as spry and handsome as ever.”

“Jenny’s too bad-tempered to ever do anything but dry up and blow away,”Dr. Peabody said.

“You’ll remember I never let you wait on me, when I’m not well,” she retorted. “I reckon you’ll be tearing off again on thenext train, won’t you?” she asked young Loosh.

“Yessum, I’m afraid so. My vacation hasn’t comedue, yet.”

‘Well, at this rate you’ll spend it at an old men’s home somewhere. Why don’t you all come out and have dinner, so he can see the boy?”

“I’d like to,” young Loosh answered, “but I don’t have time to do all the things I want to, so I just make up my mind not to do any of ‘em. Besides, I’ll have to spend this afternoon fishing” he added.

“Yes,” his father put in, “and choppin’ up good fish with a pocket knife just to see what makes ‘em go. Lemme tell you what he did this mawnin’: he grabbed that old lame hound of Abe’s and operated on its shoulder so quick that Abe not only didn’t know what he was doing, but even the dawg didn’t. Only you forgot to look for his soul,” he added.

“You don’t know if he hasn’t got one,” young Loosh said, unruffled. “Dr. Straud is trying to find the soul by electricity; he says—”

“Fiddlesticks,”Miss Jenny snapped. “You better get a jar of Will Falls’ salve and give it to him, Loosh. Well—” she glanced at the sun “—I’d better be going. If you won’t come out to dinner—?”

“Thank you,ma’am,” young Loosh answered. His father said:

“I brought him in to show him that collection of yours. We didn’t know we looked that underfed.”

“Help yourself,” Miss Jenny answered. She went on, and they stood and watched her trim back until it passed from view.

“And now there’s another one,” young Loosh said musingly. “Another one to grow up and keep his folks in a stew until he finally succeeds in doing what they all expect of him. Well, maybe that Benbow blood will sort of hold him down. They’re quiet folks, that girl; .and Horace sort of...and just women to raise him...”

Dr. Peabody grunted. “He’s got Sartoris blood in him, too.”

All of Narcissi’s instincts had been antipathetic to him; his idea was a threat and his presence a violation of the very depths of her nature: in the headlong violence of him she had been like a lily in a gale which rocked it to its roots in a sort of vacuum, without any actual laying-on of hands. And now the gale had gone on; the lily had forgotten it as its fury died away into fading vibrations of old terrors and dreads, and the stalk recovered and the bell itself was untarnished save by the friction of its own petals. The gale is gone, and though the lily is sad a little with vibrations of ancient fears, it is not sorry.

Miss Jenny had arrived home, looking a little spent, and Narcissa had scolded her and at last prevailed on her to lie down after dinner. And here she had dozed while the drowsy afternoon wore away, and waked to lengthening shadows and a sound of piano keys touched softly from downstairs. I’ve slept all afternoon she told herself, rising. In Narcissa’s room the child slept in his crib; beside him the nursedozed placidly; Miss Jenny tiptoed out and descended the stairs and drew her chair out from behind the piano. Narcissa ceased.

“Do you fed rested?”Narcissa asked. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Fiddlesticks,’? Miss Jenny said. “It always does me good to see all those fool pompous men lying there with their marble mottoes and things. Thank the Lord, none of them will have a chance at me. I reckon the Lord knows His business, but I declare, sometimes … Play something.”Narcissa obeyed, playing softly, and Miss Jenny sat listening for a while. But presently she began to talk of the child. Narcissa played quietly on, her white dress with itsv black ribbon at the waist vaguely luminous in the gloom. Jasmine drifted steadily in, and Miss Jenny talked on about little Johnny. Narcissa played with rapt inattention, as though she were not listening. Then, without ceasing and without turning her head, she said:

“He isn’t John. He’s Benbow Sartoris.”

“What?”

“His name is Benbow Sartoris “she repeated.

Miss Jenny sat quite still for a moment Twilight thickened slowly about them; Narcissa’s dress was pale as wax. In the next room Elnora moved about, laying the table for supper. “And do you think that’ll do any good?” Miss Jenny demanded. “Do you think you can change one of ‘em with a name?”

The music went on in the dusk; the dusk was peopled with ghosts of glamorous and old disastrous things. And if they were just glamorous enough, there would be a Sartoris in them, and then they were sure to be disastrous. Pawns. But the Player and the game He plays—who knows? He must have a name for his pawns, though, but perhaps Sartoris isthe name of the game itself—a game outmoded and played with pawns shaped too late and to an old dead pattern, and of which the Player Himself is a little wearied. For there is death in the sound of it, and a glamorous fatality, like silver pennons downrushing at sunset, or a dying fall of horns along the road to Roncevaux.

“Do you think,” Miss Jenny insisted, “that because his name is Benbow, he’ll be any less a Sartoris and a scoundrel and a fool?”

Narcissa played on as though she were not listening. Then she turned her head and without ceasing her hands, she smiled at Miss Jenny quietly, a little dreamily, with serene fond detachment. Beyond Miss Jenny’s trim fading head the window curtains hung motionless without any wind; beyond the window evening was a windless lilac dream, foster-dam of quietude and peace.

Oxford, Miss

29 September 1927

end.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Faulkner, born New Albany, Mississippi, September 25, 1897—died July 6, 1962. Enlisted Royal Air Force, Canada, 1918. Attended University of Mississippi. Traveled in Europe 1925-1926. Resident of Oxford, Mississippi, where he held various jobs while trying to establish himself as a writer. First published novel, Soldier’ Pay, 1926. Writer in Residence at the University of Virginia 1957-1958. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1950.