Flags in the Dust (33 page)

The letter lay on the table that night, forgotten; it was not until the next morning that she discovered it and opened it.

“I am trying to forget you I cannot forget you Your big eyes your black hair how white your black hair make you look. And how you walk I am watching you a smell you give off like a flowr. Your eyes shine with mistry and how you walk makes me sick like a fevver all night thinking how you walk. I could touch you you would not know it Every day. But I can not I must pore out on paper must talk You do not know who. Your lips like cupids bow when the day comes when I will press them to mine like I dreamed like a fevver from heaven to hell. I know what you do I know more than you think I see men visting you with bitter twangs. Be care full I am a desprate man Nothing any more to me now If you unholy love a man I will kill him.

“You do not anser. I know you got it I saw one in your hand bag. You better anser soon I am desprate man eat up with fevver I can not sleep for. I will not hurt you but I am desprate. Do not forget I will not hurt you but I am a desprate man.”

Meanwhile the days accumulated. Not sad days nor
lonely: they were too feverish to be sorrowful, what with her nature torn in two directions, and the walls of her serene garden cast down, and she herself like a night animal or bird caught in a beam of light and trying vainly to escape. Horace had definitely gone his way; and like two strangers they followed the routine of their physical days, in an unbending estrangement of long affection and similar pride beneath a shallow veneer of trivialities. She sat with Bayard almost every day now, but at a discreet distance of two yards. At first he tried to override her with bluster, then with cajolery. But she was firm and at last he desisted and lay gazing quietly out the window or sleeping while she read. From time to time Miss Jenny would come to the door and look in at them and go away. Her shrinking, her sense of anticipation and dread while with him, was gone now, and at times instead of reading they talked, quietly and impersonally, with the ghost of that other afternoon between them, though neither ever referred to it. Miss Jenny had been a little curious about that day, but Narcissa was gravely and demurely noncommittal about it; nor had Bayard ever talked of it, and so there was another bond between them, but unirksome. Miss Jenny had heard gossip about Horace and Belle, but on this subject also Narcissa had nothing to say.

“Have it your own way,” Miss Jenny said tartly. “I can draw my own conclusions. I imagine Belle and Horace can produce quite a mess together. And I’m glad of it. That man is making an old maid out of you. It isn’t too late now, but if he’d waited five years later to play the fool, there wouldn’t be anything left for you except to give music lessons. But you can get married, now.”

“Would you advise me to marry?” Narcissa asked.

“I wouldn’t advise anybody to marry. You wont be happy, but then, women haven’t got civilized enough yet to be happy
unmarried, so you might as well try it. We can stand anything, anyhow. And change is good for folks. They say it is, at least.”

But Narcissa didn’t believe that. I shall never marry, she told herself. Men.…… that was where unhappiness lay, getting men into your life. And if I couldn’t keep Horace, loving him as I did.…… Bayard slept. She picked up the book and read on to herself, about antic people in an antic world where things happened as they should. The shadows lengthened eastward. She read on, lost from mutable things.

After a while Bayard waked, and she fetched him a cigarette and a match. “You wont have to do this any more,” he said. “I reckon you’re sorry.”

His cast would come off tomorrow, he meant, and he lay smoking his cigarette and talking of what he would do when he was about again. He would see about getting his car repaired first thing; have to take it to Memphis, probably. And he planned a trip for the three of them—Miss Jenny, Narcissa, and himself—while the car was in the shop. “It’ll take about a week,” he added. “She must be in pretty bad shape. Hope I didn’t hurt her guts any.”

“But you aren’t going to drive it fast anymore,” she reminded him. He lay still, his cigarette burning in his fingers. “You promised,” she insisted.

“When did I promise?”

“Don’t you remember? That.…… afternoon, when they were.……”

“When I scared you?” She sat watching him with her grave troubled eyes. “Come here,” he said. She rose and went to the bed and he took her hand.

“You wont drive it fast again?” she persisted.

“No,” he answered. “I promise.” And they were still so, her hand in his. The curtains stirred in the breeze, and the leaves
on the branch beyond the window twinkled and turned and lisped against one another. Sunset was not far away; it would cease then. He moved.

“Narcissa,” he said, and she looked at him. “Lean your face down here.”

She looked away, and for a while there was no movement, no sound between them.

“I must go,” she said at last, quietly, and he released her hand.

His cast was gone, and he was up and about again, moving a little gingerly, to be sure, but already Miss Jenny was beginning to contemplate him a little anxiously. “If we could just arrange to have one of his minor bones broken every month or so, just enough to keep him in the house.…”

“That wont be necessary,” Narcissa told her. “He’s going to behave from now on.”

“How do you know?” Miss Jenny demanded. “What in the world makes you think that?”

“He promised he would.”

“He’ll promise anything when he’s flat on his back,” Miss Jenny retorted. “They all will; always have. But what makes you think he’ll keep it?”

“He promised me he would,” Narcissa replied serenely.

His first act was to see about his car. It had been pulled into town and patched up after a fashion until it would run under its own power, but it would be necessary to take it to Memphis to have the frame straightened and the body repaired. Bayard was all for doing this himself, fresh-knit ribs and all, but Miss Jenny put her foot down and after a furious half hour, he was vanquished. And so the car was driven in to Memphis by a
youth who hung around one of the garages in town. “Narcissa’ll take you driving in her car, if you must ride,” Miss Jenny told him.

“In that little
peanut parcher?” Bayard said derisively. “It wont do more than twenty one miles an hour.”

“No, thank God,” Miss Jenny answered. “And I’ve written to Memphis and asked ’em to fix yours so it’ll run just like that, too.”

Bayard stared at her with humorless bleakness. “Did you do any such damn thing as that?”

“Oh, take him away, Narcissa,” Miss Jenny exclaimed. “Get him out of my sight. I’m so tired of looking at you.”

But he wouldn’t ride in Narcissa’s car at first. He missed no opportunity to speak of it with heavy, facetious disparagement, but he wouldn’t ride in it. Dr Alford had evolved a tight elastic bandage for his chest so that he could ride his horse, but he had developed an astonishing propensity for lounging about the house when Narcissa was there. And Narcissa came quite often. Miss Jenny thought it was on Bayard’s account and pinned the guest down in her forthright way; whereupon Narcissa told her about Horace and Belle while Miss Jenny sat indomitably erect on her straight chair beside the piano.

“Poor child,” she said, and “Lord, aint they fools?” and then: “Well, you’re right; I wouldn’t marry one of ’em either.”

“I’m not,” Narcissa answered. “I wish there weren’t any of them in the world.”

Miss Jenny said, “Hmph.”

And then one afternoon they were in Narcissa’s car and Bayard was driving, over her protest at first. But he was behaving himself quite sensibly, and at last she relaxed. They drove down the valley road and turned into the hills and she asked
where they were going, but his answer was vague. So she sat quietly beside him and the road mounted presently in long curves among dark pines in the slanting afternoon. The road wound on, with changing sunshot vistas of the valley and the opposite hills at every turn, and always the sombre pines and their faint exhilarating odor. After a time they topped a hill and Bayard slowed the car. Beneath them the road sank, then flattened away toward a line of willows, crossed a stone bridge and rose again curving redly from sight among the dark trees.

“There’s the place,” he said.

“The place?” she repeated dreamily; then as the car rolled forward again, gaining speed, she roused herself and understood what he meant. “You promised,” she cried, but he jerked the throttle down its ratchet and she clutched him and tried to scream. But she could make no sound, nor could she close her eyes as the narrow bridge hurtled dancing toward them. And then her breath stopped and her heart as they flashed with a sharp reverberation like hail on a tin roof, between willows and a crashing glint of water and shot on up the next hill. The small car swayed on the curve, lost its footing and went into the ditch, bounded out and hurled across the road. Then Bayard straightened it out and with diminishing speed it rocked on up the hill, and stopped. She sat beside him, her bloodless mouth open, beseeching him with her wide hopeless eyes. Then she caught her breath, wailing.

“I didn’t mean—” he began awkwardly. “I just wanted to see if I could do it,” and he put his arms around her and she clung to him, moving her hands crazily about his shoulders. “I didn’t mean——” he essayed again, and then her crazed hands were on his face and she was sobbing wildly against his mouth.

Through the morning hours and following his sleepless night, he bent over his desk beneath the green-shaded light, penning his neat, meticulous figures into the ledgers. The routine of the bank went on; old Bayard sat in his tilted chair in the fresh August morning while passers went to and fro, greeting him with florid cheerful gestures and receiving in return his half military salute—people cheerful and happy with their orderly affairs; the cashier served the morning line of depositors and swapped jovial anecdote with them. For this was the summer cool spell and there was a vividness in the air, a presage of the golden days of frost and yellowing persimmons in the wornout fields, and of sweet small grapes in the matted vines along the sandy branches, and the scent of cooking sorghum upon the smoky air. But Snopes crouched over his desk after his sleepless night, with jealousy and thwarted desire and furious impotent rage in his vitals.

His head felt hot and dull, and heavy, and to the cashier’s surprise, he offered to buy the coca-colas, ordering two for himself, drank them one after the other and returned to his ledgers. So the morning wore away. His neat figures accumulated slowly in the ruled columns, steadily and with a maddening aloofness from his own turmoil and without a mistake although his mind coiled and coiled upon itself, tormenting him with fleeing obscene images in which she moved with another. He had thought it dreadful when he was not certain that there was another; but now to know it, to find knowledge of it on every tongue.…… and young Sartoris, at that: a man whom he had hated instinctively with all his sense of inferiority and all the venom of his worm-like nature. Married, married. Adultery, concealed if suspected, he could have borne; but this, boldly, in the world’s face, flouting him with his own
impotence.…… He dug a cheap, soiled handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped the saliva from his jaws.

By changing his position a little he could see old Bayard, could catch a glint of his white suit where he sat oblivious in the door. There was a sort of fascination in the old fellow now, serving as he did as an object upon which Snopes could vent the secret, vicarious rage of his half-insane mind. And all during the morning he watched the other covertly; once old Bayard entered the cage and passed within arms’ length of him, and when he moved his hand to wipe his drooling mouth, he found that the page had adhered to his wrist, blotting the last entry he had made. With his knife blade he erased the smear and rewrote it.

All the forenoon he bent over his ledgers, watching his hand pen the neat figures into the ruled columns with a sort of astonishment. After his sleepless night he labored in a kind of stupor, his mind too spent even to contemplate the coiling images of his lust, thwarted now for all time, save with a dull astonishment that the images no longer filled his blood with fury and despair, so that it was some time before his dulled nerves reacted to a fresh threat and caused him to raise his head. Virgil Beard was just entering the door.

He slid hurriedly from his stool and slipped around the corner and darted through the door of old Bayard’s office. He crouched within the door, heard the boy ask politely for him, heard the cashier say that he was there a minute ago but that he reckoned he had stepped out; heard the boy say well, he reckoned he’d wait for him. And he crouched within the door, wiping his drooling mouth with his handkerchief.

After a while he opened the door cautiously. The boy squatted patiently and blandly on his heels against the wall, and Snopes stood again with his clenched trembling hands. He did not curse: his desperate fury was beyond words; but his
breath came and went with a swift ah-ah-ah sound in his throat and it seemed to him that his eyeballs were being drawn back and back into his skull, turning further and further until the cords that drew them reached the snapping point. He opened the door.

“Hi, Mr Snopes,” the boy said genially, rising; but Snopes strode on and entered the grille and approached the cashier.

“Res,” he said, in a voice scarcely articulate, “gimme five dollars.”

“What?”

“Gimme five dollars,” he repeated hoarsely. The cashier did so, scribbled a notation and speared it on the file at his elbow. The boy had come up to the second window, but Snopes went on and he followed the man back to the office, his bare feet hissing on the linoleum floor.

“I tried to find you last night,” he explained. “But you wasn’t to home.” Then he looked up and saw Snopes’ face, and after a moment he screamed and broke his trance and turned to flee. But the man caught him by his overalls, and he writhed and twisted, screaming with utter terror as the man dragged him across the office and opened the door that gave onto the vacant lot. Snopes was trying to say something in his mad, shaking voice, but the boy screamed steadily, hanging limp from the other’s hand as he tried to thrust the bill into his pocket. At last he succeeded and the boy, who staggered away, found his legs, and fled.