Flags in the Dust (40 page)

Forthright and inscrutable and unpredictable: sometimes she stayed an hour motionless before the fire while he sat nearby and did not dare touch her; sometimes she lay beside him while the firelight, fallen to a steady glow of coals, filled his bedroom with looming and motionless shadows until midnight or later, talking about her former lovers with a brutality that caused him hopeless and despairing anger and something of a child’s hurt disillusion; speaking of them with that same utter lack of vanity and conventional modesty with which she discussed her body, asking him to tell her again that he thought her body beautiful, asking him if he had ever seen a match for her legs, then taking him with a savage and carnivorous suddenness that left him spent. Yet all the while remote beyond that barrier of cold inscrutability which he was never able to break down, and rising at last, again that other feline and inaccessible self and departing without even the formality of a final kiss or a Goodbye and leaving him to wonder, despite the evidences of her presence, whether he had not dreamed it, after all.

She made but one request of him: that he refrain from talking to her of love. “I’m tired of having to listen to it and talk and act a lot of childish stupidity,” she explained. “I dont know anything about it, and I dont care to.”

“You dont think there is any such thing?” he asked.

“I’ve never found it. And if we can get anything from each other worth having, what’s the use in talking about it? And it’ll take a race of better people than we are to bear it, if there’s any such thing. Save that for Belle: you’ll probably need it.”

One night she did not depart at all. That was the night she revealed another feline trait: that of a prowling curiosity about dark rooms. She had paused at Narcissa’s door, and although he tried to draw her onward, she opened the door and found the light switch and pressed it on. “Whose room is this?”

“Narcissa’s,” he answered shortly. “Come away.”

“Oh, your sister’s. The one that married that Sartoris.” She examined the room quietly. “I’d like to have known that man,” she said in a musing tone. “I think I’d be good for him. Marrying women, then leaving them after a month or two. Only one man ever left me,” she stated calmly. “I was practically a child, or that wouldn’t have.…… Yes, I’d have been just the thing for him.” She entered the room; he followed and took her arm again.

“Come away, Joan.”

“But I dont know,” she added. “Maybe it’s a good thing he’s gone, after all. For both of us.”

“Yes. Come away.”

She turned her head and stared at him with her level inscrutable eyes, beneath the bronze disorder of her hair. “Men are funny animals,” she said. “You carry so much junk around with you.” There was in her eyes a cold derisive curiosity. “What do you call it? sacrilege? desecration?”

“Come away,” he repeated.

Next day, in the gray December forenoon among the musty books in his office, the reaction found him. It was more than reaction: it was revulsion, and he held a spiritual stocktaking with a sort of bleak derision: for a moment, in company
with the sinister gods themselves, he looked down upon Horace Benbow as upon an antic and irresponsible worm. It was worse; it was conduct not even becoming a college sophomore—he, who had thought to have put all such these ten years behind him; and he thought of his sister and he felt unclean. On the way home at noon he saw Harry Mitchell approaching, and he ducked into a store and hid—a thing Belle had never caused him to do.

He would not go to his room, where the impact of her presence must yet linger, and Eunice served his meal with her face averted, emanating disapproval and reproach; and he angered slowly and asked her the direct question. “Has Mrs Heppleton gone yet, Eunice?”

“I dont know, suh,” Eunice answered, still without looking at him. She turned doorward.

“You dont know when she left?”

“I dont know, suh,” Eunice repeated doggedly, and the swing door slapped behind her in dying oscillations.

But he would not mount to his room, and soon he was back down town again. It was a gray, raw day, following the two recent weeks of bright frosty weather. Christmas was not a week away, and already the shop windows bloomed in toy fairylands, with life in its mutations in miniature among cedar branches and cotton batting and dusted over with powdered tinsel, amid which Santa Claus in his myriad avatars simpered in fixed and rosy benignance; and with fruit and cocoanuts and giant sticks of peppermint; and fireworks of all kinds—roman candles and crackers and pinwheels; and about the muddy square fetlock-deep horses stood hitched to wagons laden with berried holly and mistletoe.

He was too restless to remain in one place, and through the short afternoon, on trivial pretexts or on no pretext at all, he descended the stairs and walked along the streets among the
slow throngs of black and white in the first throes of the long winter vacation; and at last he realized that he was hoping to see her, realized it with longing and with dread, looking along the street before him for a glimpse of her shapeless marten coat and the curbed wild blaze of her hair, and the lithe and purposeful arrogance of her carriage, ready to flee when he did so.

But by the time he reached home in the early dusk the dread was still there, but it was only the savor of the longing, and without even pausing to remove his hat and coat he went to the telephone in its chill and darkling alcove beneath the stairs. And he stood with the chill receiver to his ear and watching the cloudy irregularity of his breath upon the nickel mouthpiece, waiting until out of the twilight and the chill the lazy purring of her voice should come. After a time he asked central to ring again, with polite impatience. He could hear the other instrument shrill again and he thought of her long body rising from its warm nest in her chair before a fire somewhere in the quiet house, imagined he could hear her feet on stairs nearer and nearer “Now. Now she is lifting her hand to the receiver now Now.” But it was Rachel, the cook. Naw, suh, Miz Heppleton aint here. Yes, suh, she gone away. Suh? Naw, suh, she aint comin’ back. She went off on de evenin’ train. Naw, suh, Rachel didn’t know where she was going.

It used to be that he’d fling his coat and hat down and Narcissa would come along presently and hang them up. But already bachelordom was getting him house-broke—accomplishing what affection never had and never would—and he hung his coat, in the pocket of which an unopened letter from Belle lay forgotten, carefully in the closet beneath the stairs, fumbling patiently with his chilled hands until he found a vacant hook. Then he mounted the stairs and opened his door and entered the cold room where between the secret walls she lingered yet in a hundred palpable ways—in the mirror
above his chest of drawers, in the bed, the chairs; on the deep rug before the hearth where she had crouched naked and drowsing like a cat. The fire had burned out; the ashes were cold and the room was icy chill: outside, the graying twilight. He built up the fire and drew his chair close to the hearth and sat before it, his thin delicate hands spread to the crackling blaze.

.…… this time it was a ford car, and Bayard saw its wild skid as the driver tried to jerk it across the treacherous thawing road, and in the flashing moment and with swift amusement, he saw, between the driver’s cravatless collar and the woman’s stocking bound around his head beneath his hat and tied under his chin, his adam’s apple like a scared puppy in a tow sack. This flashed on and behind, and Bayard wrenched the wheel, and the stalled ford swam sickeningly into view again as the big car slewed greasily upon the clay surface, its declutched engine roaring. Then the other car swam from sight again as he wrenched the wheel over and slammed the clutch in for more stability; and once more that sickening, unhurried rush as the car refused to regain its feet and the frosty December world swept laterally across his vision. Old Bayard lurched against him: from the corner of his eye he could see the old fellow’s hand clutching at the top of the door. Now they were facing the bluff on which the cemetery lay; directly over them John Sartoris’ effigy lifted its florid stone gesture, and from among motionless cedars gazed out upon the valley where for two miles the railroad he had built ran beneath his carven eyes. Bayard wrenched the wheel once more.

On the other side of the road a precipice dropped sheer
away, among scrub cedars and corroded ridges skeletoned brittlely with frost and muddy ice where the sun had not yet reached; the rear end of the car hung timelessly over this before it swung again, with the power full on, swung on until its nose pointed down hill again, with never a slackening of its speed. But still it would not come into the ruts again and it had lost the crown of the road, and though they had almost reached the foot of the hill, Bayard saw they would not make it. Just before they slipped off he wrenched the steering wheel over and swung the nose straight over the bank, and the car poised lazily for a moment, as though taking breath. “Hang on,” he shouted to his grandfather. Then they plunged.

An interval utterly without sound and in which all sensation of motion was lost. Then scrub cedar burst crackling about them and whipping branches of it exploded upon the radiator and slapped viciously at them as they leaned with braced feet, and the car slewed in a long bounce. Another vacuum-like interval, then a shock that banged the wheel into Bayard’s chest and jerked it in his tight hands, wrenching his arm-sockets. Beside him his grandfather lurched forward and he threw out his arm just in time to keep the other from crashing through the windshield. “Hang on,” he shouted again. The car had never faltered and he dragged the leaping wheel over and swung it down the ravine and opened the engine again, and with the engine and the momentum of the plunge, they rocked and crashed on down the ditch and turned and heaved up the now shallow bank and onto the road again. Bayard brought it to a stop.

He sat motionless for a moment. “Whew,” he said. And then: “Great God in the mountain.” His grandfather sat motionless beside him, his hand still clutching the door and his head bent a little. “Think I’ll have a cigarette, after that,” Bayard added. He dug one from his pocket, and a match; his
hands were shaking. “I thought of that damn concrete bridge again, just as she went over,” he explained, apologetically. He took a deep draught at his cigarette and glanced at his grandfather. “Y’all right?” Old Bayard made no reply, and with the cigarette poised, Bayard looked at him. He sat as before, his head bent a little and his hand on the door. “Grandfather?” Bayard said sharply. Still old Bayard didn’t move, even when his grandson flung the cigarette away and shook him roughly.

Up the last hill the tireless pony bore him, and in the low December sun their shadow fell longly across the ridge and into the valley beyond, from which the high, shrill yapping of the dogs came again upon the frosty windless air. Young dogs, Bayard told himself, and he sat his horse in the faint scar of the road, listening as the high-pitched hysteria of them swept echoing across his aural field. Motionless, he could feel frost in the air. Above him the pines, though there was no wind in them, made a continuous dry, wild sound, as though the frost in the air had found voice; above them against the high evening blue, a shallow V of geese slid. There’ll be ice tonight, he thought, watching them and thinking of black backwaters where they would come to rest, of rank bayonets of dead grasses about which water would shrink soon in fixed glassy ripples in the brittle darkness. Behind him the earth rolled away ridge on ridge blue as woodsmoke, on into a sky like thin congealed blood. He turned in his saddle and stared unwinking into the sun that spread like a crimson egg broken upon the ultimate hills. That meant weather: he snuffed the still tingling air, hoping he smelled snow.

The pony snorted and tossed his head experimentally, and
found the reins slack and lowered his nose and snorted again into the dead leaves and the delicate sere needles of pine beneath his feet. “Come up, Perry,” Bayard said, jerking the reins. Perry raised his head and broke into a stiff, jolting trot, but Bayard lifted him smartly out of it and into his steady foxtrot again. He had not gone far when the dogs broke again into clamorous uproar to his left, and suddenly near, and as he reined Perry back and peered ahead along the fading scar of the road, he saw the fox trotting sedately toward him in the middle of it. Perry saw it at the same time and laid his fine ears back and rolled his young eyes. But the animal came on unawares at its steady, unhurried trot, glancing back over its shoulder from time to time. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Bayard whispered, holding Perry rigid between his knees. The fox was not forty yards away, yet still it came on, seemingly utterly unaware of the horseman. Then Bayard shouted.

The animal glanced at him; the level sun swam redly and fleetingly in its eyes, then with a single modest flash of brown it was gone. Bayard expelled his breath: his heart was thumping against his ribs. “Whooy,” he yelled. “Come on, dogs!” The din of them swelled to a shrill pandemonium and the pack boiled into the road in a chaos of spotted hides and flapping tongues and ears. None of them was more than half grown, and ignoring the horse and rider they surged still clamoring into the undergrowth where the fox had vanished and shrieked frantically on; and as Bayard stood in his stirrups and gazed after them, preceded by yapping in a still higher and more frantic key, two even smaller puppies swarmed out of the woods and galloped past him on their short legs, with whimpering cries and expressions of ludicrous and mad concern. Then the clamor died into hysterical echoes, and so away.

He rode on. On either hand was a ridge: the one darkling like a bronze bastion, upon the other the final rays of the sun
lying redly. The air crackled and tingled in his nostrils and seared his lungs with exhilarating needles. The road followed the valley; but half the sun now showed above the western wall, and among intermittent trees, he rode stirrup-deep in shadow like cold water. He would just about reach the house before dark, and he shook Perry up a little. The clamor of the dogs swelled again ahead of him, approaching the road again, and he lifted Perry into a canter.