Flags in the Dust Page 9

  She said: “Besides, you ain’t foolish enough to believe he’ll drive slow just because there’s somebody with him, are you? If you do think so, you’d better send Simon along. Lord knows Simon can spare the time. Since you quit using the carriage, if he does anything at all, I don’t know it” She read the paper again.

  Old Bayard’s cigar smoked in his fingers.

  “I might send Isom,” he said.

  Miss Jenny’s paper rattled sharply and she stared at her nephew for a long moment “God in heaven, man, why don’t you put a block and chain On him and have done with it?”

  “Well, didn’t you suggest sending Simon with him, yourself? Simon has his work to do, but all Isom ever does is saddle my horse once a day, and I can do that myself.”

  “I was trying to be ironical,” Miss Jenny said. “God knows, I should have learned better by this time. But if you’ve got to invent something new for the niggers to do, you let it be Simon. I need Isom to keep a roof over your head and food on the table.” She rattled the paper. “Why don’t you come right out and tell him not to drive fast? A man that has to spend eight hours a day sitting in a chair in that bank door ought not to have to spend the rest of the afternoon helling around the country in an automobile if he don’t want to.”

  “Do you think it would do any good to ask him? There was never a damned one of ‘em ever paid any attention to my wishes yet.”

  “Ask the devil,” Miss Jenny said. “Who said anything about ask? Tell him not to. Tell him that if you hear again of his going fast in it, that you’ll frail the life out of him. I believe anyway that you like to ride in that car, only you won’t admit it, and you just don’t want him to ride in it when you can’t go too.” But old Bayard had slammed his feet to the floor and risen, and he tramped heavily from the room.

  Instead of mounting the stairs, however, Miss Jenny heard his footsteps the away down the halL and presently she rose and followed to the back porch, where he stood in the darkness there. The night was dark, myriad with drifting odors of the spring and with insects. Dark against lesser dark, the barn loomed upon the sky.

  “He hasn’t come yet,” she said impatiently, touching his arm. “I could have told you. Go on up and go to bed, now; don’t you know he’ll let you know when he comes in? You’re going to think him into a ditch somewhere, with these fool notions of yours.” Then more gently: “You’re too childish about that car. It’s no more dangerous at night than it is in daylight. Come on, now.”

  He shook her hand off, but he turned obediently and entered the house. This time he mounted the stairs and she could hear him in his bedroom, thumping about. Presently he ceased slamming doors and drawers and lay beneath the reading lamp with his Dumas, and he lay reading quietly. After a time the door opened and young Bayard entered and came into the radius of the light with his bleak eyes.

  His grandfather did not remark his presence and he touched old Bayard’s arm. Then old Bayard looked up, and when he did so young Bayard turned and quitted the room.

  After the shades on the windows were drawn at three o’clock old Bayard retired to his office to wait until his grandson came for him. In the front of the bank the cashier and the book-keeper could hear him clattering and banging around. The cashier paused, a stack of silver clipped neatly in his fingers.

  “Hear ‘im?” he said. “Something on his mind here, lately. Used to be he was quiet as a mouse back, there until they come for him, but last few weeks he tramples and thumps around back there like he was fighting hornets.”

  The book-keeper said nothing. The cashier set the stack of silver aside, built up another one.

  “Something on his mind, lately. That examiner must a put a bug in his ear, I reckon.”

  The book-keeper said nothing. He swung the adding machine to his desk and clicked the lever over. In the back room old Bayard moved audibly about. The cashier stacked the remaining silver neatly and rolled a cigarette. The book-keeper bent above the steady clicking of the adding machine, and the cashier sealed his cigarette and lit it and waddled to the window and lifted the curtain.

  “Simon’s brought the carriage, today,” he said

  “That boy finally wrecked that car, I reckon. Better call Colonel.”

  The book-keeper slid from his stool and went to the door to the office and opened it. Old Bayard glanced up from his desk.

  “All right, Byron,” he said. The book-keeper turned away.

  Old Bayard stalked through the bank and opened the street door and stopped utterly, the door knob in his hand.

  “Where’s Bayard?” he said.

  “He ain’t comin’,” Simon answered. Old Bayard crossed the pavement.

  “What? Where is he?”

  “He en Isom off somewhar in dat cyar,” Simon answered. “Lawd knows whar dey is by now. Takin’ dat boy away fum his work in de middle of de day, cyar-ridin’. After all de time I spent tryin’ to git some sense inter Isom’s haid,” Simon continued. “Cyar-ridin’,” he said. “Cyar-ridin’.” Old Bayard got in the carriage.

  “I’ll be damned,” old Bayard said, “if I haven’t got the triflingest set of foils to make a living for in the whole damn world. There’s just one tiling about it: when I finally have to go to the poor house, every damned one of you’ll be there when I come.”

  “Now, here you quoilin’ too,” Simon said. “Miss Jenny shoutin’ at me ‘twell I wuz thru de gate, and now you already started at dis end. But ef Mr. Bayard don’t leave dat boy alone, he ain’t gwine to be no better’n a town nigger spite of all I kin do.”

  “Jenny’s already ruined him,” old Bayard said. “Bayard can’t hurt him much.”

  “You sho’ tole de troof den,” Simon agreed. He gathered up the reins. “Come up, dar.”

  “Here, hold up a minute, Simon,” old Bayard said.

  Simon reined the horses back! “Whut you want now?”

  Old Bayard drew another long breath. “Go back to my office and get me a cigar out of that jar on the mantel.” .

  Two days later, as he and Simon tooled sedately homeward through the afternoon, simultaneously almost with the warning thunder of it the car burst upon them on a curve, slewed into the ditch and into the road again and rushed on; and in the flashing instant he and Simon saw the whites of Isom’s eyes and the ivory cropping of his teeth behind the steering wheel. When the car returned home that afternoon Simon conducted Isom to the barn and whipped him with a harness strap.

  That night they sat in the office after supper. Old Bayard held his cigar unlighted in his fingers. Miss Jenny was immersed in her paper.

  Suddenly old Bayard said: “Maybe he’ll get tired of it after a while.”

  Miss Jenny raised her head.

  “And when he does,” Miss Jenny said, “don’t you know what he’ll get then? When he finds that car won’t go fast enough fo’ him?” she demanded, staring at him across her newspaper. He sat holding his cigar, his head bent a little. “He’ll buy an aeroplane,” Miss Jenny told him. She rattled the paper and turned a page. “He ought to have a wife,” she added in a detached voice, reading again. “Let him get a son, then he can break his neck as soon and as often as he pleases. Providence doesn’t seem to have any judgment at all,” she said, thinking of the two of them, of his dead brother. She said: “But Lord knows, I’d hate to see any girl I was fond of, married to him.” She rattled the paper again, turning another page. “I don’t know what else you expect from him. From any Sartoris. You don’t waste your afternoons riding in that car because you think it’ll keep him from turning it over: you go because when it does happen, you want to be in it, too. So do you think you’ve got any more consideration for folks than he has?” He sat holding his cigar, his face still averted. Miss Jenny was watching him again across her paper.

  “I’m coming down town in the morning, and we’re going and have the doctor look at that bump on your face, you hear?”

  In his room, as he removed his collar and tie before the chest of drawers, his
eye fell upon the pipe which he had laid there four weeks ago, and he put the collar and tie down and picked up the pipe and held it in his hand, rubbing the charred bowl slowly with his thumb.

  Then with sudden decision he quitted the room and tramped down the hall. At the end of the hall a stair mounted into the darkness. At the foot he fumbled a light switch and followed the cramped turnings cautiously in the dark, to a door set at a difficult angle, and opened it upon a broad, low room with a pitched ceiling, smelling of dust and silence and ancient disused things.

  The room was cluttered with indiscriminate furniture—chairs and sofas like patient ghosts holding lightly in dry and rigid embrace yet other ghosts—a fitting place for dead Sartorises to gather and speak among themselves of glamorous and old disastrous days. The unshaded light swung on a single cord from the center of the ceiling. He unknotted it and drew it to its full length and carried it across to a nail in the wall above a cedar chest. He fastened it here and drew a chair across to the chest and sat down.

  The chest had not been opened since 1901, when his son John had succumbed to yellow fever and an old Spanish bullet-wound. There had been two occasions since, in July and in October of last year, but the other grandson still possessed quickness and all the incalculable portent of his heritage. So he had forborne for the time being, expecting to kill two birds with one stone, as it were.

  Thus each opening was in a way ceremonial, commemorating the violent finis to some, phase of his family’s history, and while he struggled with the stiff lock it seemed to him that a legion of ghosts breathed quietly at his shoulder, and he pictured a double line of them with their arrogant identical faces waiting just beyond a portal and stretching away toward the invisible dais where Something sat waiting the latest arrival among them; thought of them chafing a little and a little bewildered, thought and desire being denied them, in a place where, immortal, there were no opportunities for vainglorious swashbuckling. Denied that Sartoris heaven in which they could spend eternity dying deaths of needless and magnificent violence while spectators doomed to immortality looked eternally on. The Valhalla which John Sartoris, turning the wine glass in his big, well-shaped hand that night at the supper table, had seen in its chaste and fragile bubble.

  The lock gave at last and he raised the lid. The ghosts fell away and .from the chest there rose a thin exhilarating odor of cedar, and something else: a scent drily and muskily nostalgic, as of old ashes, and his hands, well-shaped but not so large and a shade less capable than his father’s, rested for a moment upon a brocade garment. The brocade was richly hushed and the fall of fine Mechlin was dustily yellow, pale and textureless as winter sunlight. He raised the garment carefully. The lace cascaded mellow and pale as spilled wine upon his hands, and he laid it aside and lifted out next a rapier. It was a Toledo, a blade delicate and fine as the prolonged stroke of a violin bow, in a velvet sheath. The sheath was elegant and flamboyant and soiled, and the seams had cracked drily.

  Old Bayard held the rapier upon his hands for a while, feeling the balance of it. It was just such an implement as a Sartoris would consider the proper equipment for raising tobacco in a virgin wilderness; it and the scarlet heels and the ruffled wristbands in which he fought his stealthy and simple neighbors. And old Bayard held it upon his two hands, seeing in its stained fine blade and shabby elegant sheath the symbol of his race; that too in the tradition: the thing itself fine and clear enough, only the instrument had become a little tarnished in its very aptitude for shaping circumstance to its arrogant ends.

  He laid it aside. Next came a heavy cavalry sabre, and a rosewood box containing two dueling pistols with silver mountings and with the lean, deceptive delicacy of race horses, and what old man Falls had called “that ‘ere dang der’nger.” It was a stubby, evil-looking thing with its three barrels; viciously and coldly utilitarian, and between the other two weapons it lay like a cold and deadly insect between two flowers.

  He lifted out next the blue army forage-cap of the ‘forties and a small pottery vessel and a Mexican machete, and a long-necked oil can such as locomotive drivers use. It was of silver, and engraved upon it, surrounded by a carven ornate wreath, was the picture of a locomotive with a huge bell-shaped funnel Beneath it, the name, “Virginia” and the date, “August 9, 1874.”

  He laid these aside and with sudden purposefulness he removed the other objects—a frogged and braided coat of Confederate grey and a gown of sprigged muslin scented faintly of lavender and evocative of old formal minuets and drifting honeysuckle among steady candle flames—and came upon a conglomeration of yellowed papers neatly bound in packets, and at last upon a huge, brass-bound Bible. He raised this to the edge of the chest and opened it. The paper was brown and mellow. with years, and it had a texture like that of slightly-moist wood ashes, as though each page were held intact by Its archaic and fading print lie turned the pages carefully back to the fly leaves. Beginning near the bottom of the final blank page, a column of names and dates rose in stark, fading simplicity, growing fainter and fainter where time had lain upon; them. At the top they were still legible, as they were at the foot of the preceding page. But halfway up this page they ceased, and from there on the sheet was blank save for the faint soft mottlings of time and an occasional brownish penstroke significant but without meaning.

  Bayard sat for a long time, regarding the stark dissolving apotheosis of his name. Sartorises had derided Time, but Time was not vindictive, because it was longer than Sartorises. And probably unaware of them. But it was a good gesture, anyway. And he recalled his father’s words.

  “In the nineteenth century,” John Sartoris had said, ‘‘chording over genealogy anywhere is poppycock. But particularly so in America, where only what a man takes and keeps has any significance, and where all of lis have a common ancestry and the only house from which we can claim descent with any assurance, is the Old Bailey, Yet the man Who professes to care nothing about his forbears is only a little less vain than he who bases all his actions on blood precedent. And a Sartoris is entitled to a little vanity and poppycock, if he wants it.”

  Yes, it was a good gesture, and Bayard sat and mused quietly on the tense he had unwittingly used. Was. Fatality again: the augury of a man’s destiny peeping out at him from the roadside hedge, if he but recognize it; and as he sat and gazed with blind eyes at the page, Time rolled back again and again he ran panting through undergrowth while a Yankee cavalry patrol crashed behind him, crashed fainter and fainter until he crouched with spent, laboring lungs in a bramble thicket and heard their fading thunder along a dim wagon road. Then he crawled forth again and went to a spring he knew that flowed from the roots of a beech tree; and as he leaned his mouth to it the final light of day was reflected onto his face, bringing into sharp relief forehead and nose above the cavernous sockets of his eyes and the panting animal snarl of his teeth, and from the still water there stared back at him for a sudden moment, a skull.

  The unturned corners of man’s destiny. Well, heaven, that crowded place, lay just beyond one of them, they claimed; heaven, filled with every man’s illusion of himself and with the conflicting illusions of him that parade through the minds of other illusions...He stirred again and sighed quietly, and took out his fountain pen. At the bottom of the column he wrote:

  “John Sartoris. July 5, 1918.”

  and beneath that:

  “Caroline White Sartoris and son. October 27, 1918.”

  When the ink was dry he closed the book and replaced it and took the pipe from his pocket and put it in the rosewood box with the dueling pistols and the derringer and replaced the other things and closed the chest and locked it again.

  Young Bayard drove her to town the next morning, Old Bayard sat tilted in his chair in the door, and he looked up at her with a fine assumption of surprise and his deafness seemed more pronounced than ordinary. But she got him out of his chair with cold implacability and led him still grumbling along the street, where merchants and loungers before the stor
es spoke to her as to a martial queen, old Bayard stalking along beside her, with laggard reluctance, like that of a small boy.

  But she carried him firmly on, and at a row of dingy signs tacked flat to the wall, she turned and mounted a narrow stairway debouching between two stores. At the top was a dark corridor with doors. The nearest door was of pine, its gray paint scarred at the bottom as though it had been kicked repeatedly by feet that struck it at the same height and with the same force. In the door itself, near the edge, two holes an inch apart bore mute witness to the missing hasp, and from a staple in the jamb depended the hasp itself , fixed there by a huge rusty lock of a pattern which had not been manufactured in twenty years. Bayard offered to stop here, but Miss Jenny led him firmly on to the second door across the hall

  This door was freshly painted and grained to represent walnut. Into the top half of it was let a pane of thick, opaque glass bearing a name in raised gilt letters, and two embracing office hours. Miss Jenny opened this door and Bayard followed her into a small cubbyhole of a room of spartan but suave asepsis. The walls were an immaculate new gray, with an engraved reproduction of a Corot and two spidery dry-points in narrow frames, and it contained a new rug in warm buff tones and a bare table and four chairs in fumed oak—all impersonal and clean and inexpensive, but revealing at a glance the proprietor’s soul; a soul hampered now by material strictures, but destined and determined to someday function in its proper surroundings—that of Persian rugs and mahogany or teak, and a single irreproachable print on the chaste wall. A young woman in a starched white dress rose from a smaller table in one corner, patting her hair.

  “Good morning, Myrtle,” Miss Jenny said. “Tell Dr. Alford we’d like to see him, please.”

  “You have an appointment?” the girl said in a voice without any inflection at all.

  “We’ll make one now, then,” Miss Jenny replied. “You don’t mean to say Dr. Alford don’t come to work before ten o’clock, do you?”