Flags in the Dust Read online

  “Your sword, Sir,” Stuart commanded, and the prisoner removed his weapon and Stuart took it and pinned his scribbled note to the table-top with it. The note read:

  “General Stuart’s compliments to General Pope, and he is sorry to have missed him again. He will call again tomorrow.”

  Stuart gathered his reins, forward,” he said.

  They descended the knoll and crossed the empty glade and at an easy canter they took the road they had traversed that dawn—the road that led toward home. Stuart glanced back at his captive, at the gallant black with its double burden. “If you will direct us to the nearest cavalry picket I will provide you with a proper mount,” he offered again.

  “Will General Stuart, cavalry leader and General Lee’s eyes, jeopardize his safety and that of his men and his cause in order to provide for the temporary comfort of a minor prisoner of his sword? This is not bravery: it is. the rashness of a heedless and headstrong boy. There are fifteen thousand men within a radius of two miles of this point; even General’ Stuart cannot conquer that many, though they are Yankees, single-handed.”

  “Not for the prisoner, Sir,” Stuart replied haughtily, “but for the officer suffering the fortune of war. No gentleman would do less.”

  “No gentleman has any business in this war,” the major retorted. “There is no place for him here. He is an anachronism, like anchovies. General Stuart did not capture our anchovies,” he added tauntingly. “Perhaps he will send Lee for them in person?”

  “Anchovies,” repeated Bayard Sartoris who galloped nearby, and he whirled his horse. Stuart shouted at him, but he lifted his reckless stubborn hand and flashed on; and as the General would have turned to follow a Yankee picket fired his musket from the roadside and darted into the woods, shouting the alarm. Immediately other muskets exploded on all sides and from the forest to the right came the sound of a considerable body put suddenly into motion, and behind them in the direction of the knoll, a volley crashed. A third officer spurred up and caught Stuart’s bridle.

  “Sir, Sir,” he exclaimed. “What would you do?”

  Stuart held his horse rearing, and another volley rang behind them, dribbling off into single scattered reports, crashed focalized again, and the noise to the right swelled nearer. “Let go, Allan,” Stuart said. “He is my friend.”

  But the other clung on. “It is too late,” he said. “Sartoris can only be killed: you would be captured.”

  “Forward, Sir, I beg,” the captive major added. “What is one man, to a paladin out of romance?”

  “Think of Lee, for God’s sake, General!? the aide implored, forward!” he shouted to the troop, spurring his own horse and dragging the General’s onward as a body of Federal horse burst from “the woods behind them.

  “And so” Aunt Jenny finished, “Mister Stuart went on and Bayard rode back after those anchovies, with all Pope’s army shooting at him. He rode yelling Yaaaiiih, Yaaaiiih, come on, boys!’ right up the knoll and jumped his horse over the breakfast table and rode it into the wrecked commissary tent, and a cook who was hidden under the mess stuck his arm out and shot Bayard in the back with a derringer.

  “Mister Stuart fought his way out and got back home without losing but two men. He always spoke well of Bayard. He said he was a good officer and a fine cavalryman, but that he was too reckless.”

  They sat quietly for a time, in the firelight. The flames leaped and popped on the hearth and sparks soared in wild swirling plumes up the chimney, and Bayard Sartoris’ brief career swept like a shooting star across the dark plain of their mutual remembering and suffering, lighting it with a transient glare like a soundless thunder-clap, leaving a sort of radiance when it died. The guest, the Scottish engineer, had sat quietly, listening. After a time he spoke.

  “When he rode back, he was not actually certain there were anchovies, was he?” .

  “The Yankee major said there were,” Aunt Jenny replied.

  “Ay.” The Scotsman pondered again. “And did Mister Stuart return next day, as he said in ’s note?”

  “He went back that afternoon,” Aunt Jenny answered, “looking for Bayard.” Ashes soft as rosy feathers shaled glowing onto the hearth, and faded to the softest gray. John Sartoris leaned forward into the firelight and punched at the blazing logs with the Yankee musket-barrel.

  “That was the god-damdest army the world ever saw, I reckon,” he said.

  “Yes,” Aunt Jenny agreed. “And Bayard was the god-damdest man in it.”

  “Yes,” John Sartoris admitted soberly, “Bayard was wild.” The Scotsman spoke again.

  “This Mister Stuart, who said your brother was reckless: Who was he?”

  “He was the cavalry general Jeb Stuart,” Aunt Jenny answered. She brooded for a while upon the fire; her pale indomitable face held for a moment a tranquil tenderness. “He had a strange sense of humor,” she said. “Nothing ever seemed quite so diverting to him as General Pope in his night-shirt,” She dreamed once more on some faraway place beyond the rosy battlements of the embers. “Poor man,” she said. Then she said quietly: “I danced a valse with him in Baltimore in ‘58,” and her voice was proud and still as banners in the dust.

  ...But the door was closed now, and what light passed through the colored panes was richly and solemnly hushed. To his left was his grandsons’ room, the room in which .his grandson’s wife and her child had died last October. He stood beside this door for a moment, then he opened it quietly. The blinds were closed and the room was empty, and he stood on the dark threshold for a while. Then he slammed the door to and tramped on with that heavy-footed obliviousness of the deaf and entered his own bedroom and crashed the door behind him, as was his way of shutting doors.

  He sat down and removed his shoes, the shoes that were “made to his measure twice a year by a Saint Louis house, then he rose and went in his stockings to the window and looked down upon his saddle-mare tethered to a mulberry tree in the back yard and a negro lad lean and fluid of movement as a hound, lounging richly static nearby. From the direction of the kitchen, invisible from this window, Elnora’s endless minor ebbed and flowed unheard by him upon the lazy scene.

  He crossed to his closet and drew therefrom a pair of scarred and stained riding-boots and stamped into them and took a cigar from the humidor on the table beside his huge walnut bed, and he stood for a time with the cigar clamped between his teeth, having forgotten to light it Through the doth of his pocket his hand touched the pipe there, and he took it out and laid it on top of his chest of drawers. Then he quitted the room and banged the door behind him and tramped heavily down the stairs and out the backdoor.

  Isom waked easily and untethered the mare and held the stirrup. He mounted and remembered the cigar at last and fired it Isom opened the gate into the lot and closed it, and trotted on ahead and opened the gate that let his master into the field beyond, and closed that one. Bayard rode on, trailing his pungent smoke.

  Elnora stood barelegged in the center of the kitchen floor and soused her mop into the pail and thumped it on the floor again.

  “Sinner riz fum de moaner’s bench,

  Sinner jump to de penance bench;

  When de preacher ax’im whut de reason why,

  Says ‘Preacher got de women jes’ de same ez I’.

  Oh, Lawd, Oh Lawd!

  Dat’s whut de matter wid de church today.”

  2

  Simon’s destination was a huge brick House set well up onto the street. The lot had been the site of a fine old colonial house which rose among magnolias and oaks and flowering shrubs. But the house had burned and some of the trees had been felled to make room for an architectural garbling so imposingly terrific as to possess a kind of chaotic majesty. It was a monument to the frugality (and the mausoleum of the social aspirations of his women) of a hillman who had moved in from a small settlement called Frenchman’s Bend and who, as Miss Jenny Du Pre put it, had built the handsomest house in Frenchman’s Bend on the most beautiful lot in Jefferson. Th
e hillman had stuck it out for two years during which his womenfolks sat about the veranda all morning in lace-trimmed “boudoir caps” and spent the afternoons in colored silk riding through the streets in a new rubber-tired surrey; then the hillman sold his house to a newcomer in the town and took his women back to the country and doubtless set them to work again.

  A number of motor cars ranked along the street lent a formally festive air to the place, and Simon with his tilted cigar stub wheeled up and drew rein and indulged in a brief colorful altercation with a negro sitting behind the wheel of a car parked before the hitching-block. “Don’t block off no Sartoris car’iage, black boy,” he added when the other had moved the motor and permitted Simon access to the post. “Block off de commonality, ef you wants, ‘but don’t intervoke no equipage waitin’ on Cunnel or Miss Jenny. Dey won’t stand for it.”

  He descended and tethered the team, and his spirit mollified by the rebuke administered and laved with the beatitude of having gained his own way, Simon paused and examined the motor car with curiosity and no little superciliousness tinged faintly with envious awe, and spoke affably with its conductor. But not for long, for Simon had sisters in the Lord in this kitchen, and presently he let himself through the gate and followed the path that led around to the back. He could hear the party going on as he passed beneath the windows: that stained unintelligible gabbling with which white ladies could surround themselves without effort and which they seemed to consider a necessary (or unavoidable) adjunct to having a good time. The fact that it was a card party would have seemed neither paradoxical nor astonishing to Simon, for time and much absorbing experience had taught him a fine tolerance of white folks’ vagaries and for those of ladies of any color.

  The hillman had built his house so close to the street that the greater part of the original lawn with its fine old trees lay behind it. There were once crepe-myrtle and syringa and lilac and jasmine bushes without order, and casual stumps and fences with honeysuckle overgrown; and after the original house had burned these had taken the place and made of its shaggy formality a mazed and scented jungle loved of mockingbirds and thrushes, where boys and girls lingered on spring and summer nights among drifting fireflies and choiring whip-poor-wills. Then the hillman had bought it and cut some of the trees in order to build his house near the street after the country fashion, and chopped out the jungle of bushes and vines and whitewashed the remaining trees and ran his barn- and hog- and chicken-lot fences between their ghostly trunks. He didn’t remain long enough to learn of garages.

  Some of the antiseptic desolation of his tenancy had faded now, and its present owner had set out more shrubbery—jasmine and mock-orange and verbena—with green iron tables and chairs beneath them and a pool and a tennis court; and Simon passed on with discreet assurance, and on a consonantless drone of female voices he rode into the kitchen where a thin woman in a funereal purple turban and poising a beaten biscuit heaped with a mayonnaise-impregnated something in a soiled kid glove, and a mountainous one in the stained apron of her calling and drinking melted ice-cream from a saucer, rolled their eyes at him.

  “I seed him on de street yistiddy and he looked bad; he jes’ didn’t favor hisself,” the visitor was saying as Simon entered, but they dropped the theme of conversation immediately and made him welcome.

  “Ef it ain’t Brother Strother,” they said in unison. “Come in, Brother Strother. How is you?”

  “Po’ly, ladies; po’ly,” Simon replied. He doffed his hat and unclamped his cigar and stowed it away in the hat-band. “I’se had a right smart mis’ry in de back. Is y’all kep’ well?”

  “Right well, I thank you, Brother Strother,” the visitor replied. Simon drew a chair up to the table, as he was bidden.

  “What you gwine eat, Brother Strother?” the cook demanded hospitably. “Dey’s party fixin’s, and dey’s some cole greens and a little sof’ ice-cream lef’ f’um dinner.”

  “I reckon I’ll have a little ice-cream and some of dem greens, Sis’ Rachel,” Simon replied. “My teef ain’t much on party doin’s no mo’.” The cook rose with majestic deliberation and waddled across to a pantry and reached down a platter. She was one of the best cooks in Jefferson: no mistress dared protest against the social amenities of Rachel’s kitchen.

  “Ef you ain’t de beatin’es’ man!” the first guest exclaimed. “Eatin’ ice-cream at yo’ age!”

  “I been eatin’ ice-cream sixty years,” Simon said. “Whut reason! got fer quittin’ now?”

  “Dat’s right, Brother Strother,” the cook agreed, placing the dish before him. “Eat yo’ ice-cream when you kin git it Jes’ a minute and I’ll—Here, Meloney,” she interrupted herself as a young light negressJn a smart white apron and cap entered, bearing a tray of plates containing remnants of edible edifices copied from pictures in ladies’ magazines and possessing neither volume nor nourishment, with which the party had been dulling its palates against supper, “git Brother Strother a bowl of dat ‘ere ice cream, honey.”

  The girl clashed the tray into the sink and rinsed a bowl at the water tap while Simon watched her with his still little eyes. She whipped the bowl through a towel with a fine show of derogatory carelessness, and with her nose at a supercilious angle she clattered on her high heels across the kitchen, still under Simon’s unwinking regard, and slammed a door behind her. Then Simon turned his head again.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he repeated, “I been eatin’ ice cream too long to quit at my age.”

  “Dey won’t no vittle hurt you ez long ez you kin stomach ‘um,” the cook agreed, raising her saucer to her lips again. The girl returned with her head still averted and set the bowl of viscid liquid before Simon who, under cover of this movement, dropped his hand on her thigh. The girl smacked him sharply on the back of his gray head with her flat palm.

  “Miss Rachel, can’t you make him keep his hands to hisself?”

  “Ain’t you ‘shamed,” Rachel demanded, but without rancor. “A ole gray-head man like you, wid a family of grown chillen and one foot in de cemetery?”

  “Hush yo’ mouf, woman,” Simon said placidly, spooning spinach into his soft ice-cream. “Ain’t dey erbout breakin’ up in yonder yit?”

  “I reckon dey’s erbout to,” the other guest answered, putting another laden biscuit into her mouth with a gesture of elegant gentility. “Seems like dey’s talkin’ louder.”

  “Den dey’s started playin’ again,” Simon corrected. “Talkin’ jes’ eased off whiles dey et. Yes, suh, dey’s started playin’ again. Dat’s white folks. Nigger ain’t got sense ernough to play cards wid all dat racket goin’ on.”

  But they were breaking up. Miss Jenny Du Pre had just finished a story which left the three players at her table avoiding one another’s eyes a little self-consciously, as was her way. Miss Jenny travelled very little, and in Pullman smokerooms not at all, and people wondered where she got her stories; who had told them to her. And she repeated them anywhere and at any time, choosing the wrong moment and the wrong audience with a cold and cheerful audacity. Young people liked her, and she was much in demand as a chaperone for picnic parties.

  She now spoke across the room to the hostess. “I’m going home, Belle,” she stated. “I think we are all tired of your party, I know I am.” The hostess was a plump, youngish woman and her cleverly rouged face showed now an hysterical immersion that was almost repose, but when Miss Jenny broke into her consciousness with the imminence of departure this faded quickly, and her face resumed its familiar expression of strained and vague dissatisfaction and she protested conventionally but with a petulant sincerity, as a well-bred child might,

  But Miss; Jenny was adamant and she rose and her slender wrinkled hand brushed invisible crumbs from the bosom of her black silk dress. “If I stay any longer I’ll miss Bayard’s toddy time,” she explained with her usual forthrightness, “Come on, Narcissa, and I’ll drive you home”

  “I have my car, thank you, Miss Jenny,” the young woman to whom she s
poke replied in a grave contralto, rising also; and the others rose with sibilant gathering motions above the petulant modulation of the hostess’ protestings, and they drifted slowly into the hall and clotted again before mirrors, colorful and shrill Miss Jenny pushed steadily toward the door.

  “Come along, come along,” she repeated. “Harry Mitchell won’t want to run into all this gabble when he comes home from work.”

  “Then he can sit in the car out in the garage,” the hostess rejoined sharply. “I do wish you wouldn’t go. Miss Jenny, I don’t think I’ll ask you again.”

  But Miss Jenny only said “Goodbye, goodbye” with cold affability, and with her delicate replica of the Sartoris nose and that straight grenadier’s back of hers which gave the pas for erectness to only one back in town—that of her nephew Bayard—she stood at the top of the steps, where Narcissa Benbow joined her, bringing with her like an odor that aura of grave and serene repose in which she dwelt. “Belle meant that, too,” Miss Jenny said.

  “Meant what, Miss Jenny?”

  “About Harry...Now, where do you suppose that damn nigger went to?” They descended the steps and from the parked motors along the street came muffled starting explosions, and the two women traversed the brief flower-bordered walk to the curb. “Did you see which way my driver went?” Miss Jenny asked of the negro in the car next her carriage.