Flags in the Dust Read online

  But both of these were utterly beyond her; it was not in her nature to differentiate between motives whose results were the same, and on occasions when she had seen them conducting themselves as civilized beings, had been in the same polite room with them, she found herself watching them with shrinking and fearful curiosity, as she might have looked upon wild beasts with a temporary semblance of men and engaged in human activities, morally acknowledging the security of the cage but spiritually unreassured.

  But she had not seen them often. They were either away at school, or if at home they passed their headlong days in the country, coming into town at rare intervals and then on horseback, in stained corduroy and flannel shirts. Yet rumors of their doings came in to her from time to time, causing always in her that shrinking, fascinated distaste, that blending of curiosity and dread, as if a raw wind had blown into that garden wherein she dwelt. Then they would be gone again, and she would think of them only to remember Horace and his fine and electric delicacy, and to thank her gods he was not as they.

  Then the war, and she learned without any surprise whatever that they had gone to it. That was exactly what they would do, and her nature drowsed again beneath the serene belief that they had been removed from her life for good and always; to her the war had been brought about for the sole purpose of removing them from her life as noisy dogs are shut up in a kennel afar off. Thus her days. Man became amphibious and lived in mud and filth and died and was buried in it; the world looked on in hysterical amazement. But she, within her walled and windless garden, thought of them only with a sober and pointless pity, like a flower’s exhalation, and like the flower, uncaring if the scent be sensed or not. She gave clothing and money to funds, and she knitted things also, but she did not know where Saloniki was and was incurious as to how Rheims or Przemysl were pronounced.

  Then Horace departed, with his Snopes, and the war became abruptly personal But it was still not the same war to which the Sartoris boys had gone; and soon she was readjusted again, with Aunt Sally Wyatt in the house and the steady unemphasis of their feminine days. She joined the Red Cross and various other welfare organizations, and she knitted harsh wool with intense brooding skill and performed other labors while other women talked of their menfolks into her grave receptivity.

  There was a family of country people moved recently to town—a young man and his pregnant wife and two infant children. They abode in a rejuvenated rented cabin on the edge of town, where the woman did her own housework, while the man was employed by the local distributor for an oil company, laboring all day with a sort of ^ager fury of willingness and a desire to get on. He was a steady, exemplary sort, willing and unfailingly good-natured “and reliable, so he was drafted immediately and denied exemption and ravished celeritously overseas. His family accompanied him to the station in an automobile supplied by the charity of an old lady of the town, and they watched him out of their lives with that tearless uncomplaining gravity of primitive creatures. The Red Cross took charge of the family, but Narcissa Benbow adopted them. She was present when the baby was born two weeks later, she superintended the household—meals and clothing—until the woman was about again, and for the next twelve months she wrote a monthly letter to the husband and father who, having no particular aptitude for it save his unflagging even temper and a ready willingness to do as he was told, was now a company cook in the S.O.S.

  This occupation too was just a grave centering of her days; there was no hysteria in it, no conviction that she was helping to slay the biblical Beast, or laying up treasure in heaven. Horace was away too; she was waiting for him to return, marking time, as it were. Then Bayard Sartoris had returned home, with a wife. She sensed the romantic glamor of this with interest and grave approval, as of a dramatic scene, but that was all; Bayard Sartoris went away again. Narcissa met his wife now and then, and always with a little curiosity, as though, voluntarily associating so intimately with a Sartoris, she too must be an animal with the temporary semblance of a human being. There was no common ground between them, between Narcissa with her constancy, her serenity which the other considered provincial and a little dull, and the other with her sexless vivid unrepose and the brittle daring of her speech and actions.

  She had learned of John Sartoris’ death without any emotion whatever except a faint sense of vindication, a sort of I-told-you-so feeling, which recurred (blended now with a sense of pitying outrage, blaming this too on Bayard) when Bayard’s wife died in childbirth in October of the same year, even though she stood with old Bayard’s deaf and arrogant back and Miss Jenny’s trim indomitability amid sad trees and streaming marble shapes beneath a dissolving afternoon. Then November, and bells and whistles and revolvers. Horace would be coming home soon now, she thought at the time. Before Christmas, perhaps. But before he did so she had seen Bayard once on the street, and later, while she and Miss Jenny sat in Miss Jenny’s dim parlor one morning, he came unexpectedly to the door and stood there looking at her with his bleak and brooding gaze.

  “It’s Bayard,” Miss Jenny said. “Come in here and speak to Narcissa, sonny.”

  He said Hello and she turned on the piano bench, again with that feeling of curiosity and dread. ‘Who is it?” he said, and he came into the room, bringing with him like a raw wind that cold leashed violence which-she remembered.

  “It’s Narcissa Benbow,” Miss Jenny repeated testily. “Go on and speak to her and stop acting like you don’t know who she is.”

  Narcissa gave him her hand and he stood holding it, but he was not looking at her. She withdrew her hand, and he glanced at her again, then away, and he loomed above them and stood rubbing his hand through his hair.

  “I want a drink,” he said “I can’t find the key to the desk.”

  “Stop and talk to us a few minutes, and you can have one.”

  He stood for a moment above them, then he moved abruptly and before Miss Jenny could speak he had dragged the holland envelope from another chair.

  “Let that alone, you Indian!” Miss Jenny exclaimed. She rose. “Here, take my chair, if you’re too weak to stand up any longer. I’ll be back in a minute,” she added to Narcissa. “I’ll have to get my keys.”

  He sat laxly in the chair, rubbing his hand through his hair, his gaze brooding somewhere about his booted feet. Narcissa sat utterly quiet, watching him with that blending of shrinking and fascination. She said at last:

  “I am so sorry about John and your wife. I asked Miss Jenny to tell you when she wrote...”

  He sat rubbing his head slowly, in the brooding violence of his temporary repose.

  “You aren’t married yourself, are you?” he asked. She sat quietly, watching him. “Ought to try it,” he added. “Everybody ought to get married once, like everybody ought to go to one war.”

  Miss Jenny returned with the keys, and he got his long abrupt body erect and left them. After that day, she called on Miss Jenny only when she was sure he was not at home.

  2

  It was a week before Caspey returned home. In the meantime young Bayard had driven out from Memphis in his car. Memphis was seventy-five miles away and the trip had taken an hour and forty minutes because some of the road was narrow clay country road. The car was long and low and gray; the four-cylinder engine had sixteen valves and eight sparkplugs, and the people had guaranteed that it would run eighty miles an hour, although there was a strip of paper pasted to the windshield, to which he paid no attention whatever, asking him in red letters not to do so for the first five hundred miles.

  Miss Jenny was frankly interested: she must get in and sit in it for a while; and though Simon affected to pay it but the briefest derogatory notice, Isom circled quietly about it with an utter and yearning admiration. But old Bayard just looked down at th long, dusty thing from his chair on the veranda, and grunted.

  He would not descend to examine it, even, despite Miss Jenny’s insistence, and he sat with his feet on the rail and watched Bayard slide in under the wheel and drive slowly
off with Miss Jenny beside him watched them glide noiselessly down the drive and saw the car pass out of sight down the valley. Presently above the trees a cloud of dust rose into the azure afternoon and hung rosily in the sun, and a sound as of leashed thunder died muttering behind it, but this had no significance for him. Isom squatted below him on the steps.

  It had no significance even when they returned in twenty minutes; he did not even see the car until i had entered the gate and was swooping up the drive and came to a stop almost in its former tracks. Miss Jenny had no hat, and she was holding her hair in both hands, and when the car stopped she sat for a moment so, then she drew a long breath.

  “I wish I smoked cigarettes,” she said, and then “Is that as fast as it’ll go?”

  “How fer y’all been, Miss Jenny?” Isom asked, rising and circling the car again with his diffident yearning. Miss Jenny opened the door and got out a little stiffly, but her voice was clear as a girl’s and he eyes were shining and her dry old cheeks were flushed.

  “We’ve been to town,” she answered proudly. Town was four miles away.

  After that the significance grew slowly. He received intimations of it from various sources. But because of his deafness, these intimations came slowly since they must come directly to him and not through overheard talk. The actual evidence, the convincing evidence, came from old man Falls. Eight or ten times a year he walked in from the county farm, always stopping in at the bank. Twice a year old Bayard bought him a complete outfit of clothing, and on the other occasions he had always for him a present of tobacco and a small sack of peppermint candy, of which the old fellow was inordinately fond. He would never take money.

  Old Bayard’s office was also the directors’ room. It was a large room containing a long table aligned with chairs, and a tall cabinet in which blank banking forms were kept, and old Bayard’s roll-top desk and swivel chair, and a sofa on which he napped occasionally in the hot afternoons. His desk, like the one . at home, was cluttered with an astonishing variety of objects which had no relation to the banking business whatever, and the mantel above the fireplace bore yet more objects of an agricultural nature, as well as a dusty assortment of pipes and three or four jars of tobacco which furnished solace for all the banking force and for a respectable portion of the bank’s pipe-smoking clientele. Weather permitting, old Bayard spent most of the day sitting in a tilted chair in the bank door, and when these patrons found him there, they would pass on back to the office and fill their pipes. It was a sort of unspoken convention not to take more than a pipeful at a time.

  It was to this room that they would retire on old man Falls’ visits, and here they would sit (they were both deaf) and shout at one another for half an hour or so, about John Sartoris and crops. You could hear them plainly from the street and through the wall of the store on either side. Old man Falls’ eyes were blue and innocent as a boy’s and his first act after he and old Bayard were seated, was to open Bayard’s parcel and take from it a plug of chewing tobacco, cut off a chew and put it in his mouthy replace the plug and wrap and tie the parcel neatly again. He never cut the string, but always untied the tedious knot with his stiff, gnarled fingers.

  And he sat now in his clean, faded overalls, with the small parcel on his knees, telling Bayard about the automobile that had passed him that morning on the road Everyone had seen or heard of young Bayard’s low gray car, but old man Falls was the first to tell his grandfather how he drove it. Old Bayard sat utterly still, watching the other with his fierce old eyes until he had finished.

  “Are you sure who it was?” he asked.

  “Hit passed me too fast for me to tell whether they was anybody in hit a-tall or not I asked when I fetched town who ‘twas. Seems like everybody knows how fast he runs hit except you.?

  Old Bayard sat quietly for a time. He raised his voice:

  “Byron.”

  The door opened quietly and the book-keeper, Snopes, entered—a thin, youngish man with hairy hands and covert close eyes that looked always as though he were just blinking them, though you never saw them closed.

  “Yes, sir, Colonel,” he said in a slow, nasal voice without inflection.

  “ ‘Phone out to my house and tell my grandson not to touch that car until I come home.”

  “Yes, sir, Colonel” And he was gone as silently as he entered.

  Old Bayard slammed around in his swivel chair again and old man Falls leaned forward, peering at his face.

  “What’s that ‘ere wen you got on yo’ face, Bayard?” he asked.

  “What?” Bayard demanded, then he raised his hand to a small bump which the suffusion of his face had brought into white relief. “Here? I don’t know what it is. It’s been there about a week, but I don’t reckon it’s anything.”

  “Is it gittin’ bigger?” the other asked. He rose and laid his parcel down and extended his hand. Old Bayard drew his head away.

  “It’s nothing,” he repeated testily. “Let it alone.” But old man Falls put the other’s hand aside and touched the place with his fingers.

  “H’m,” he said. “Hard’s a rock Hit’ll git bigger, too. I’ll watch hit, and when hit’s right, I’ll take hit off. Hit ain’t ripe, yit.” The book-keeper appeared suddenly and without noise beside them.

  “Yo’ cook says him and Miss Jenny is off car-ridin’ somewheres. I left yo’ message.”

  “Jenny’s with him, you say?”

  “That’s what yo’ cook says,” the book-keeper repeated in his inflectionless voice.

  “Well, all right.”

  The book-keeper withdrew and old man Falls picked up his parcel. I’ll be gittin’ on too,” he said. “I’ll come in next week and take a look at hit. you better let hit alone till I git back.” He followed the book-keeper from the room, and presently old Bayard rose and stalked through the lobby and tilted his chair in the door again.

  That afternoon when he arrived home, the car was not in sight, nor did his aunt answer his call. He mounted to his room and put on his riding-boots and lit a cigar, but when he looked down from his window into the back yard, neither Isom nor the saddled mare was visible. He tramped down the stairs and on through the house and entered the kitchen, and there Caspey sat, eating and talking to Isom and Elnora.

  “And one mo’ time me and another boy—” Caspey was saying. Then Isom saw Bayard, and rose from his seat in the woodbox corner and his eyes rolled whitely in his bullet head. Elnora paused also with her broom, but Caspey turned his head without rising, and still chewing steadily he blinked his eyes at Bayard in the door.

  “I sent you word a week ago to come on out here at once, or not to come at all,” Bayard said. “Did you get it?” Caspey mumbled something, still chewing, and old Bayard came into the room, “Get up from there and saddle my horse.”

  Caspey turned his back deliberately and raised his glass of buttermilk from the table. “Git on, Caspey,” Elnora hissed at him.

  “I ain’t workin’ here,” he answered, just beneath Bayard’s deafness. He turned to Isom. “Whyn’t you go’n git his hoss fer him? Ain’t you workin’ here?”

  “Caspey, fer Lawd’s sake!” Elnora implored. “Yes, suh, Cunnel; he’s gwine,” she said loudly.

  “Who, me?” Caspey said. “Does I look like it?” He raised the glass steadily to his mouth, then Bayard moved again and Caspey lost his nerve and rose quickly before the other reached him, and crossed the kitchen toward the door, but with sullen insolence in the very shape of his back. As he fumbled with the door Bayard overtook him.

  “Are you going to saddle that mare?” he demanded.

  “Ain’t gwine skip it, big boy,” Caspey answered, just below Bayard’s deafness.

  “What?”

  “Oh, Lawd, Caspey!” Elnora moaned. Isom crouched into his corner. Caspey raised his eyes swiftly to Bayard’s face and opened the screen door.

  “I says, I ain’t gwine skip it,” he repeated, raising his voice. Simon stood at the foot of the steps, the setter besid
e him, gaping his toothless mouth up at them, and old Bayard reached a stick of stove wood from the box at his hand and knocked Caspey through the door and down the steps at his father’s feet.

  “Now, you go saddle that mare,” he said.

  Simon helped his son to rise and led him, a little unsteadily, toward the barn and out of earshot, while the setter watched them, gravely interested. “I kep’ tellin’ you dem new-fangled war notions of yo’n wa’n’t gwine ter work on dis place,” he said angrily. “And you better thank de Lawd fer makin’ yo’ haid hard ez it is. You go’n and git dat mare, en save dat nigger freedom talk fer town-folks: dey mought stomach it. Whut us niggers want ter be free fer, anyhow? Ain’t we got ez many white folks now ez we kin suppo’t?”

  That night at supper, old Bayard looked at his grandson across the roast of mutton. “Will Falls told me you passed him on the Poor House hill running forty miles an hour today.”

  “Forty fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said promptly, “it was fifty-four. I was watching the—what do you call it, Bayard? speedometer.”

  Old Bayard sat with his head bent a little, watching his hands trembling on the carving knife and fork; hearing beneath the napkin tucked into his waistcoat, his heart a little too light and a little too fast; feeling Miss Jenny’s eyes upon him.

  “Bayard,” she said sharply. “What’s that on your face?” He rose so suddenly at his place that his chair tipped over backward with a crash, and Ee tramped blindly from the room with his trembling hands and the light swift thudding of his heart.

  “I know what you want me to do,” Miss Jenny told old Bayard across her newspaper. “You want me to let my housekeeping go to the dogs and spend all my time in that car, that’s what you want Well, I’m not going to do it I don’t mind riding with him now and then, but I’ve got too much to do with my time to spend it keeping him from raining that car fast Neck, too,” she added. She rattled the paper crisply.