Flags in the Dust Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What’s that?” Bayard demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Mrs. Du Pre—” Dr. Alford essayed.

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

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

  “You, Loosh Peabody,” Miss Jenny said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  4

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

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

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