Flags in the Dust (20 page)

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

“Wont need it befo’ mawnin’,” the other answered. “You’ll be gone, then. Want me to he’p you off with yo’ clothes?”

“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 a succession of shallow steps against the opaline and dimensionless sky. His head was clear and cold. 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 he was only twenty-six. Not much more than a third through it. Hell.

H
orace 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. Across the tight clotting of descending and ascending passengers the sound of his spoken name reached him, and he roved his distraught gaze like a somnambulist rousing 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 car.

“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 say
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 trainhand were taking trunks and boxes as the baggage clerk tilted them out.

“Cant 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, bird-like 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 stencilled with a military address. “She’s got glass in her.”

“All right, colonel,” the baggage clerk agreed. “We aint 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 hands on the box as the clerk tilted it outward. “Easy now, boys,” he repeated nervously, and he trotted beside them as they crossed 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 aint 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. “She’s all right, aint she?” the station porter asked.

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

“I think it’s all right,” Horace agreed, his ear against the box. “I dont hear anything. It’s packed pretty well.” The engine whistled and Horace sprang erect, digging in his pocket, and ran to the moving cars. The porter was closing the vestibule, but he leaned down to Horace’s hand and straightened up and touched his cap. Horace returned to his box and gave another coin to the second negro. “Put it in the house for me, careful, now,” he directed. “I’ll be back for it in a few minutes.”

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

“I thought it was lost, once,” he confided, slipping his arm inside his sister’s, and they moved toward the car. “It was delayed at Brest and didn’t come until the next boat. I had the first outfit I bought—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 day, when the whole thing, cabin and all, took fire. The captain decided that I’d better not try it again until we got ashore, what 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. A voluptuous dream, a little sinister. 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 him 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.

“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 added, a little hurt. “You really think I am ridiculous in this?”

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

“It’s a good uniform,” he said soberly. “I dont mean this,” he said, gesturing toward the symbol on his arm. They went on. “People will realize that in about ten years, when noncom-batants’ 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 platform toward her car. “So you have dulled your palate for khaki.”

“Of course not,” she repeated, shaking his arm a little as she released it. “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,” he exclaimed, “I worry with it for four thousand miles, then lose it on my own doorstep. Much obliged, Sol.” The porter stowed the things in the car. “That’s the first outfit I got,” Horace 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?”

“Haven’t any. Had to throw most of ’em away to make room for the other things. No room for anything else.”

Narcissa sat and looked at him for a moment with fond exasperation. “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 scenes. Sidings with freight cars; the platform which in the fall would be laden with cotton bales in serried rotund ranks; the town power plant, a brick building from which there came a steady, unbroken humming and about which in the spring gnarled heaven-trees swung ragged lilac bloom against the harsh ocher and Indian red of a clay cut-bank. Then a street of lesser residences, mostly new. Same tight little houses with a 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 which had been vacant sixteen months ago when he went away. Then other streets opened away beneath arcades of green, shadier, with houses a little older and more imposing as they got away from the station’s vicinity; and pedestrians, usually dawdling negro boys at this hour or old men bound townward after their naps, to spend the afternoon in sober 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 episodic in colored lithographic mutations. Then the square, with its unbroken low skyline of old weathered brick and fading
dead names stubborn yet beneath scaling paint, and drifting negroes in casual and careless
o.d. garments worn by both sexes and country people in occasional khaki too; and the brisker urbanites weaving among their placid chewing unhaste and among the men in tilted chairs before certain stores.

The courthouse was of brick too, with stone arches rising among elms, and among the trees the monument of the confederate soldier stood, his musket at order arms, shading his carven eyes with his stone hand. Beneath the porticoes of the courthouse and upon benches about the green, the city fathers sat and talked and drowsed, in uniform too, here and there. But it was the gray of Old Jack and Beauregard and Joe Johnston, and they sat in a grave sedateness of minor political sinecures, smoking and spitting about unhurried checkerboards. 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 should come 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 remarked. “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 young Bayard’s wife died, you wrote me.”

“Yes. But he’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 turning it over. 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 biscuits; 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 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 pretty well finish the business. Give him a little time.…… But I personally cant see why he shouldn’t be allowed to kill himself, if that’s what he thinks he wants. Sorry for Miss Jenny, though.”

“Yes,” his sister agreed, quietly again. “They’re worried about Colonel Sartoris’ heart, too. Everybody except him and
Bayard, that is. I’m glad I have you instead of one of those Sartorises, Horry.” She laid her hand quickly and lightly on his thin knee.

“Dear old Narcy,” he said, then his face clouded again. “Damn scoundrel,” he said. “Well, it’s their trouble. How’s Aunt Sally been?”

“All right.” And then: “I
am
glad you’re home, Horry.”

The shabby small shops were behind, and now the street opened away between old shady lawns, spacious and quiet. These homes were quite old, in appearance at least, and, set well back from the street and its dust, they emanated a gracious and benign peace, steadfast as a windless afternoon in a world without motion or sound. Horace looked about him and drew a long breath.