Flags in the Dust (46 page)

“Perhaps fortitude is a sorry imitation of something worth while, after all. To the so many who burrow along like moles in the dark, or like owls, to whom a candle-flame is a surfeit. But not those who carry peace along with them as the candle-flame carries light. I have always been ordered by words, but it seems that I can even restore assurance to my own cowardice by cozening it a little. I dare say you cannot read this as usual, or reading it, it will not mean anything to you. But you will have served your purpose anyway, thou still unravished bride of quietude.” Thou wast happier in thy cage, happier? Horace thought, reading the words he had written and in which, as usual, he was washing one woman’s linen in the house of another. A thin breeze blew suddenly into the room; there was
locust upon it, faintly sweet, and beneath it the paper stirred upon the desk, rousing him; and suddenly, as a man waking, he looked at his watch and replaced it and wrote rapidly:

“We are glad to have little Belle with us. She likes it here: there is a whole family of little girls next door: stair steps of tow pigtails before whom, it must be confessed that little Belle preens just a little; patronizes them, as is her birthright. Children make all the difference in the world about a house. Too bad agents are not wise enough to provide rented houses with them. Particularly one like little Belle, so grave and shining and sort of irrelevantly and intensely mature, you know. But then, you dont know her very well, do you? But we both are very glad to have her with us. I believe that Harry” The pen ceased, and still poised, he sought the words that so rarely eluded him, realizing as he did so that, though one can lie about others with ready and extemporaneous promptitude, to lie about oneself requires deliberation and a careful choice of expression. Then he glanced again at his watch and crossed that out and wrote: “Belle sends love, O Serene.” and blotted it and folded it swiftly into an envelope and addressed and stamped it, and rose and took his hat. By running he could get it on the four oclock train.

Thou wast happier in thy cage, happier.…… The corridor, with its rubber mat and identical closed doors expensively and importantly discrete; the stairway with its brass-bound steps and at each turning, a heavy brass receptacle in which cigarette butts and scraps of paper reposed upon tobaccostained sand, all new, all smelling of recent varnish. There was a foyer of imitation oak and imitation marble; the street in an untempered glare of spring sunlight. The building too was new and an imitation of something else, or maybe a skillful and even more durable imitation of that, as was the whole town, the very spirit, the essence of which was crystallized in the
courthouse building—an edifice imposing as a theatre drop, flamboyant and cheap and shoddy; obviously built without any definite plan by men without honesty or taste. It was a standing joke that it had cost $60,000, and the people who had paid for it retailed the story without anger, but on the contrary with a little frankly envious admiration.

Ten years ago the town was a hamlet, twelve miles from the railroad. Then a hardwood lumber concern had bought up the cypress swamps nearby and established a factory in the town. It was financed by eastern capital and operated by as plausible and affable a set of brigands as ever stole a county. They robbed the stockholders and the timber owners and one another and spent the money among the local merchants, who promptly caught the enthusiasm, and presently widows and orphans in New York and New England were buying Stutz cars and imported caviar and silk dresses and diamond watches at three prices, and the town bootleggers and the moonshiners in the adjacent swamps waxed rich, and every fourth year the sheriff’s office sold at public auction for the price of a Hollywood bungalow. People in the neighboring counties learned of all this and moved there and chopped all the trees down and built themselves mile after mile of identical frame houses with garage to match: the very air smelled of affluence and burning gasoline. Yes, there was money there, how much, no two estimates ever agreed; whose, at any one given time, God Himself could not have said. But it was there, like that afflatus of rank fecundity above a foul and stagnant pool on which bugs dart spawning, die, are replaced in mid-darting; in the air, in men’s voices and gestures, seemingly to be had for the taking. That was why Belle had chosen it.

But for the time being Horace was utterly oblivious of its tarnished fury as he walked along the street toward the new, ugly yellow station, carrying his letter the words of which yet
echoed derisively in his mind Belle sends love Belle sends love. He had made acquaintances “In spite of yourself,” Belle told him harshly. “Thinking you are better than other people.” Yes, he had answered. Yes, with a weariness too spent to argue with its own sense of integrity. But he had made a few, some of whom he now passed, was greeted, replied: merchants, another lawyer, his barber; a young man who was trying to sell him an automobile. Naturally Belle would Belle sends love Belle sends He still carried his letter in his hand and glancing at the bulletin board on the station wall he saw that the train was a little late, and he went on down the platform to where the mail car would stop and gave the letter to the mail carrier—a lank, goose-necked man with a huge pistol strapped to his thigh Thou wast happier The express agent came along, dragging his truck in thy cage, happier “Got another ’un today?” he asked, greeting Horace.

“What?” Horace said. “Oh, good afternoon.”

“Got another ’un today?” the other repeated.

“Yes,” Horace answered, watching the other swing the truck skillfully into position beside the rails Happier The sun was warm; already there was something of summer’s rankness in it—a quality which, at home where among green and ancient trees and graver and more constant surroundings, dwelt quietude and the soul’s annealment, it had not even in July. Soon, soon, he said, and again he went voyaging alone from where his body leaned against a strange wall in a brief hiatus of the new harsh compulsions it now suffered. This will not last always: I have made too little effort to change my fellow man’s actions and beliefs to have won a place in anyone’s plan of infinity In thy cage, happier?

The locomotive slid past, rousing him: he had not heard it, and the cars on rasping wheels, and from the door of the
express car the clerk with a pencil stuck jauntily beneath his cap, flipped his hand at him. “Here you are, Professor,” he said, handing down first to the agent a small wooden crate from which moisture dripped. “Smelling a little stout, today, but the fish wont mind that, will they?” Horace approached, his nostrils tightening a little. The clerk in the car door was watching him with friendly curiosity. “Say,” he asked, “what kind of city fish you got around here, that have to have mail-order bait?”

“It’s shrimp,” Horace explained.

“Shrimp?” the other repeated. “Eat ’em yourself, do you?” he asked with interest.

“Yes. My wife’s very fond of them.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the clerk said heartily, “I thought it was some kind of patent fish-bait you were getting every Tuesday. Well, every man to his taste, I reckon. But I’ll take steak, myself. All right, Bud; grab it.”

Horace signed the agent’s receipt and lifted the crate from the truck, holding it carefully away from himself. The smell invariably roused in him a faint but definite repulsion which he was not able to overcome, though Belle preferred shrimp above all foods. And it always seemed to him for hours afterward that the smell clung about his clothing, despite the fact that he knew better, knew that he had carried the package well clear of himself. He carried it so now, his elbow against his side and his forearm at a slight, tense angle with the dripping weight.

Behind him the bell rang, and with the bitten, deep snorts of starting, the train moved. He looked back and saw the cars slide past, gaining speed, carrying his letter away and the quiet, the intimacy the writing and the touching of it, had brought him. But day after tomorrow he could write again Belle sends love Belle sends Ah, well, we all respond to strings. And She
would understand, it and the necessity for it, the dreadful need; She in her serene aloofness partaking of gods Belle sends

The street from curb to curb was uptorn. It was in the throes of being paved. Along it lines of negroes labored with pick and shovel, swinging their tools in a languid rhythm. Steadily and with a lazy unhaste that seemed to spend itself in snatches of plaintive minor chanting punctuated by short grunting ejaculations which died upon the sunny air and ebbed away from the languid rhythm of picks that struck not; shovels that did not dig. Further up the street a huge misshapen machine like an antediluvian nightmare clattered and groaned. It dominated the scene with its noisy and measured fury, but against this as against a heroic frieze, the negroes labored on, their chanting and their motions more soporific than a measured tolling of far away bells.

His arm was becoming numb, but the first mark—a water plug—where he changed hands for the first time, was still a hundred yards away; and when he reached it and swapped the crate to the other hand, his fingers were dead of all sensation and his biceps was jumping a little within his sleeve. Which goes to prove the fallacy of all theories of physical training. According to that, every succeeding Tuesday he should be able to go a little further without changing, until by Christmas he would be able to carry the package all the way home without changing hands; and by Christmas ten years, all the way back to Gulfport, where they came from. Prize, maybe. More letters behind his name, anyway. C.S. Carrier of Shrimp. H. Benbow, M.A., Ll.D., C.S. Thou wast happier

The next mark was the corner where he turned, and he went on along the treeless street, between smug rows of houses identical one with another. Cheap frame houses, patently new, each with a garage and a car, usually a car that cost as much again as the house did. He reached the corner and changed
hands again and turned into a smaller street, trailing spaced drops of melting ice behind him.

He lived on this street, and it was still open: motors could run on it, and he went on, dripping his trailing moisture along the sidewalk. With a motor car now, he could have Soon; perhaps next year; then things But naturally Belle would miss her car, after having had one always, a new one every year. Harry, and his passion for shiny wheels.…… which some would call generosity.…… “You lied to me. You told me you had plenty of money.” Lied Lied took me away from my Well, it would be better now, with little Belle. And Harry would find … who functioned in movie subtitles, harshly: “What else do you want of mine? My dam blood?”

Man’s life. No apparent explanation for it save as an opportunity for doing things he’d spend the rest of it not being very proud of. Well, she had her child again, anyway, he told himself, thinking how women never forgive the men who permit them to do the things which they later have any cause to regret; and remembering that day when, with little Belle’s awkwardly packed suitcase in the rack overhead and little Belle primly beside him in a state of demure and shining excitement at the prospect of moving suddenly to a new town, he had shrunk into his corner like a felon until the familiar station and that picture of Harry’s ugly dogged head and his eyes like those of a stricken ox, were left behind, he wondered if little Belle too would someday.…… But that last picture of Harry’s face had a way of returning. It’s only injured vanity, he argued with himself; he’s hurt in his own estimation because he couldn’t keep the female he had chosen in the world’s sight. But still his eyes and their patient bloodshot bewilderment, to be exorcised somehow. He’s a fool, anyway, he told himself savagely, And who has time to pity fools? Then he said God help us, God help us all, and then at last humor saved him and he thought
with a fine whimsical flash of it that probably Belle would send him to Harry next for a motor car.

Man’s very tragedies flout him. He has invented a masque for tragedy, given it the austerity which he believes the spectacle of himself warrants, and the thing makes faces behind his back; dead alone, he is not ridiculous, and even then only in his own eyes Thou wast happier A voice piped with thin familiarity from beyond a fence. It was little Belle playing with the little girls next door, to whom she had already divulged with the bland naiveté of children that Horace was not her real daddy: he was just the one that lived with them now, because her real daddy’s name was Daddy and he lived in another town. It was a prettier town than this, while the little girls listened with respect coldly concealed: little Belle had gained a sort of grudging cosmopolitanish glamor, what with her uniquely diversified family.

At the next gate he paused, and opened it and entered his rented lawn where his rented garage stared its empty door at him like an accusing eye, and still carrying his package carefully away from him he went on between the two spindling poplars he had set out and approached his rented frame house with its yellow paint and its naked veranda, knowing that from behind a shade somewhere, Belle was watching him. In negligee, the heavy mass of her hair caught up with studied carelessness, and her hot, suspicious eyes and the rich and sullen discontent of her mouth Lied lied took me away from my husband: what is to keep The wild bronze flame of her hair Her Injury, yes. Inexcusable because of the utter lack of necessity or reason for it. Giving him nothing, taking nothing away from him. Obscene. Yes, obscene: a deliberate breaking of the rhythm of things for no reason; to both Belle and himself an insult; to Narcissa, in her home where her serenity lingered grave and constant and steadfast as a diffused and sourceless
light, it was an adolescent scribbling on the walls of a temple. Reason in itself confounded If what parts can so remain.… “I didn’t lie. I told you; did what she would not have had the cowardice to do.” What is to keep Ay, obscene if you will, but there was about her a sort of gallantry, like a swordsman who asks no quarter and gives none; slays or is slain with a fine gesture or no gesture at all; tragic and austere and fine, with the wild bronze flame of her hair. And he, he not only hadn’t made a good battle; he hadn’t even made a decent ghost. Thou wast happier in thy cage, happier? Nor oceans and seas.……