Flags in the Dust Read online

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

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

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

  “Hi, Buck,” Mitch said. “You’re up pretty late, ain’t you?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Sure; we’re on our way home now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Aw, hell, Buck,” Mitch protested.

  “What for?” Bayard demanded.

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

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

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

  “Did Aunt Jenny tell you to arrest me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  THREE

  1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “He goes with him.”

  “What? Old Bayard in a motor car?”

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

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