Flags in the Dust (47 page)

“She had ghosts in her bed,” Horace said, mounting the steps.

In January his aunt received a post card from Bayard mailed at Tampico; a month later, from Mexico City, a wire for money. And that was the last intimation he gave that he contemplated being at any given place long enough for a communication to reach him, although from time to time he indicated by gaudy postals where he had been, after the bleak and brutal way of him. In April the card came from Rio, followed by an interval during which he seemed to have completely vanished and which Miss Jenny and Narcissa passed quietly at home, their days centered placidly about the expected child, which Miss Jenny had already named John. Miss Jenny felt that old Bayard had somehow flouted them all, had committed lese majesty toward his ancestors and the lusty glamor of the family doom by dying, as she put it, practically from the “inside out.” Thus he was in something like bad odor with her, and as young Bayard was in more or less abeyance, neither flesh nor fowl, she fell to talking more and more of John. Soon after old Bayard’s
death, in a sudden burst of rummaging and prowling which she called winter cleaning, she had found among his mother’s relics a miniature of John done by a New Orleans painter when John and Bayard were about eight. Miss Jenny remembered that there had been one of each and it seemed to her that she could remember putting them both away together when their mother died. But the other she could not find. So she left Simon to gather up the litter she had made and brought the miniature downstairs to where Narcissa sat in the “office” and together they examined it.

The hair even at that early time was of a rich tawny shade, and rather long. “I remember that first day,” Miss Jenny said, “when they came home from school. Bloody as hogs, both of ’em, from fighting other boys who said they looked like girls. Their mother washed ’em and petted ’em, but they were too busy bragging to Simon and Bayard about the slaughter they had done to mind it much. ‘You ought to seen the others,’ Johnny kept saying. Bayard blew up, of course; said it was a damn shame to send a boy out on the street with curls down his back, and finally he bullied the poor woman into agreeing to let Simon barber ’em. And do you know what? Neither of ’em would let his hair be touched. It seems there were still a few they hadn’t licked yet, and they were going to make the whole school admit that they could wear hair down to their heels, if they wanted to. And I reckon they did, because after two or three more bloody days they came home once without any fresh wounds and then they let Simon cut it off while their mother sat behind the piano in the parlor and cried. And that was the last of it as long as they were in school here. I dont know what they kept on fighting folks about after they went away to school, but they found some reason. That was why we finally had to separate ’em while they were at Virginia and send Johnny to Princeton. They shot dice or something to see
which one would be expelled, I think, and when Johnny lost they used to meet in New York every month or so. I found some letters in Bayard’s desk that the chief of police in New York wrote to the professors at Princeton and Virginia, asking ’em not to let Bayard and Johnny come back there any more, that the professors sent on to us. And one time Bayard had to pay fifteen hundred dollars for something they did to a policeman or a waiter or something.”

Miss Jenny talked on, but Narcissa was not listening. She was examining the painted face in the miniature. It was a child’s face that looked at her, and it was Bayard’s too, yet there was already in it, not that bleak arrogance she had come to know in Bayard’s, but a sort of frank spontaneity, warm and ready and generous; and as Narcissa held the small oval in her hand while the steady blue eyes looked quietly back at her and from the whole face among its tawny curls, with its smooth skin and child’s mouth, there shone like a warm radiance something sweet and merry and wild, she realized as she never had before the blind tragedy of human events. And while she sat motionless with the medallion in her hand and Miss Jenny thought she was looking at it, she was cherishing the child under her own heart with all the aroused constancy of her nature: it was as though already she could discern the dark silver shape of that doom which she had incurred, standing beside her chair, waiting and biding its time. No, No she whispered with passionate protest, surrounding her child with wave after wave of that strength which welled so abundantly within her as the days accumulated, manning her walls with invincible garrisons. She was even glad Miss Jenny had shown her the thing: she was now forewarned as well as forearmed.

Meanwhile Miss Jenny continued to talk about the child as Johnny and to recall anecdotes of that other John’s childhood, until at last Narcissa realized that Miss Jenny was getting
the two confused; and with a sort of shock she knew that Miss Jenny was getting old, that at last even her indomitable old heart was growing a little tired. It was a shock, for she had never associated senility with Miss Jenny, who was so spare and erect and brusque and uncompromising and kind, looking after the place which was not hers and to which she had been transplanted when her own alien roots in a far away place where customs and manners and even the very climate itself, were different, had been severed violently; running it with tireless efficiency and with the assistance of only a doddering old negro as irresponsible as a child.

But run the place she did, just as though old Bayard and young Bayard were there. But at night when they sat before the fire in the office as the year drew on and the night air drifted in heavy again with locust and with the song of mockingbirds and with all the renewed and timeless mischief of spring and at last even Miss Jenny admitted that they no longer needed a fire; when at these times she talked, Narcissa noticed that she no longer talked of her far off girlhood and of Jeb Stuart with his crimson sash and his garlanded bay and his mandolin, but always of a time no further back than Bayard’s and John’s childhood. As though her life were closing, not into the future, but out of the past, like a spool being rewound.

And Narcissa would sit, serene again behind her forewarned bastions, listening, admiring more than ever that indomitable spirit that, born with a woman’s body into a heritage of rash and heedless men and seemingly for the sole purpose of cherishing those men to their early and violent ends, and this over a period of history which had seen brothers and husband slain in the same useless mischancing of human affairs, had seen, as in a nightmare not to be healed by either waking or sleep, the foundations of her life swept away and had her roots torn bodily from that soil where her forefathers slept
trusting in the integrity of mankind;—a period at which the men themselves, for all their headlong and scornful rashness, would have quailed had their parts been passive parts and their doom been waiting. And she thought how much finer that gallantry which never lowered blade to foes no sword could find, that uncomplaining steadfastness of those unsung (ay, unwept, too) women than the fustian and useless glamor of the men that obscured it. And now she is trying to make me one of them; to make of my child just another rocket to glare for a moment in the sky, then die away.

But she was serene again, and her days centered more and more as her time drew nearer, and Miss Jenny’s voice was only a sound, comforting but without significance. Each week she received a whimsical, gallantly humorous letter from Horace: these she read too with tranquil detachment—what she could decipher, that is. She had always found Horace’s writing difficult, and parts that she could decipher meant nothing. But she knew that he expected that.

Then it was definitely spring again. Miss Jenny’s and Isom’s annual vernal altercation began, pursued its violent but harmless course in the garden beneath her window. They brought the tulip bulbs up from the cellar and set them out, Narcissa helping, and spaded up the other beds and unswad-dled the roses and the transplanted jasmine. Narcissa drove into town, saw the first jonquils on the deserted lawn, blooming as though she and Horace were still there, and she sent Horace a box of them, and later, the narcissi. But when the gladioli bloomed she was not going out any more save in the late afternoon or early evening, when with Miss Jenny she walked in the garden among burgeoning bloom and mockingbirds and belated thrushes where the long avenues of gloaming twilight reluctant leaned, Miss Jenny still talking of Johnny, confusing the unborn with the dead.

——

Early in June they received a request for money from Bayard in San Francisco, where he had at last succeeded in being robbed. Miss Jenny sent it. “You come on home?” she wired him, not telling Narcissa. “He’ll come home, now,” she did tell her. “You see if he dont. If for nothing else than to worry us for a while.”

But a week later he still had not come home, and Miss Jenny wired him again, a night letter. But when the wire was dispatched he was in Chicago, and when it reached San Francisco he was sitting among saxophones and painted ladies and middle aged husbands at a table littered with soiled glasses and stained with cigarette ash and spilt liquor, accompanied by a girl and two men. One of the men wore whipcord, with an army pilot’s wings on his breast. The other was a stocky man in shabby serge, with gray temples and intense, visionary eyes. The girl was a slim long thing, mostly legs apparently, with a bold red mouth and cold eyes, in an ultra smart dancing frock, and when the other two men came across the room and spoke to Bayard she was cajoling him to drink with thinly-concealed insistence. She and the aviator now danced together, and from time to time she looked back to where Bayard sat drinking steadily while the shabby man talked to him. She was saying: “I’m scared of him.”

The shabby man was talking with leashed excitability, using two napkins folded lengthwise into narrow strips to illustrate something, his voice hoarse and importunate against the meaningless pandemonium of horns and drums. For a while Bayard had half listened, staring at the man with his cold eyes, but now he was watching something or some one across the room, letting the man talk on, unheeded. He was drinking whisky and soda steadily, with the bottle beside him. His hand
was steady enough, but his face was dead white and he was quite drunk; and looking across at him from time to time, the girl was saying to her partner: “I’m scared, I tell you. God, I didn’t know what to do, when you and your friend came over. Promise you wont go and leave us.”

“You scared?” the aviator repeated in a jeering tone, but he too glanced back at Bayard’s white arrogant face. “I bet you dont even need a horse.”

“You dont know him,” the girl rejoined, and she clutched his hand and struck her body shivering against his, and though his arm tightened and his hand slid down her back a little, it was under cover of the shuffling throng into which they were wedged, and a little warily, and he said quickly:

“Ease off, Sister: he’s looking this way. I saw him knock two teeth out of an Australian captain that just tried to speak to a girl he was with in a London dive two years ago.” They moved on until the band was across the floor from them. “What’re you scared of? He’s not an Indian: he wont hurt you as long as you mind your step. He’s all right. I’ve known him a long time, in places where you had to be good, believe me.”

“You dont know,” she repeated. “I——” The music crashed to a stop; in the sudden silence the shabby man’s voice rose from the nearby table:

“——could just get one of these damn yellow-livered pilots to——” His voice was drowned again in a surge of noise, drunken voices and shrill woman-laughter and scraping chairs, but as they approached the table the shabby man still talked with leashed insistent gestures while Bayard stared across the room at whatever it was he watched, lifting his glass steadily to his lips. The girl clutched her partner’s arm.

“You’ve got to help me pass him out,” she begged swiftly. “I’m scared to leave with him, I tell you.”

“Pass Sartoris out? The man dont wear hair, nor the woman neither. Run back to kindergarden, Sister.” Then, struck with her utter sincerity, he said: “Say, what’s he done to you, anyway?”

“I dont know. He’ll do anything. He threw an empty bottle at a traffic cop as we were driving out here. You’ve got——”

“Hush it,” he commanded. The shabby man ceased talking and looked up impatiently. Bayard still gazed across the room.

“Brother-in-law over there,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully. “Dont speak to family. Mad at us. Beat him out of his wife.” They turned and looked.

“Where?” the aviator asked. He beckoned a waiter. “Here, Jack.”

“Man with diamond headlight,” Bayard said. “Brave man. Cant speak to him, though. Might hit me. Friend with him, anyhow.”

The aviator looked again. “Looks like his grandmother,” he said. He called the waiter again, then to the girl: “Another cocktail?” He picked up the bottle and filled his glass and Bayard’s, and turned to the shabby man. “Where’s yours?”

The shabby man waved it impatiently aside. “Look,” he picked up the napkins again. “Dihedral increases in ratio to air pressure. By speed up to a certain point, see? Now, what I want to find out——”

“Tell it to the Marines, buddy,” the aviator interrupted. “I heard a couple of years ago they got a airyplane. Here, waiter!” Bayard was now watching the shabby man bleakly.

“You aren’t drinking,” the girl said. She touched the aviator beneath the table.

“No,” Bayard agreed. “Why dont you fly his coffin for him, Monaghan?”

“Me?” The aviator set his glass down. “Like hell. My leave
comes due next month.” He raised his glass again. “Here’s to wind-up,” he said, “and no heel-taps.”

“Yes,” Bayard agreed, not touching his glass. His face was pale and rigid, a metal mask again.

“I tell you there’s no danger at all, as long as you keep the speed below the point I’ll give you,” the shabby man said with heat. “I’ve tested the wings with weights, and proved the lift and checked all my figures; all you have to——”

“Wont you drink with us?” the girl insisted.

“Sure he will,” the aviator said. “Say, you remember that night in Amiens when that big Irish devil, Comyn, wrecked the Cloche-Clos by blowing that
A.P.M.’s whistle at the door?” The shabby man sat smoothing the folded napkins on the table before him. Then he burst forth again, his voice hoarse and mad with the intensity of his frustrated dream: