Flags in the Dust (48 page)

“I’ve worked and slaved, and begged and borrowed, and now when I’ve got the machine and a government inspector, I cant get a test because you damn yellow-livered pilots wont take it up. A service full of you, drawing flying pay for sitting on hotel roofs, swilling alcohol. You overseas pilots talking about your guts! No wonder the Germans——”

“Shut up,” Bayard told him without heat, in his cold, careful voice.

“You’re not drinking,” the girl repeated. “Wont you?” She picked up his glass and touched her lips to it and extended it to him. Taking it, he caught her hand too and held her so. But again he was staring across the room.

“Not brother-in-law,” he said. “Husband-in-law. No. Wife’s brother’s husband-in-law. Wife used to be wife’s brother’s girl. Married, now. Fat woman. He’s lucky.”

“What’re you talking about?” the aviator demanded. “Come on, let’s have a drink.”

The girl leaned away from him at the length of her arm.
With her other hand she lifted her glass and smiled at him with brief and terrified coquetry. But he held her wrist in his hard fingers, and while she stared at him wildly he drew her steadily toward him. “Turn me loose,” she whispered. “Dont,” and she set her glass down and with the other hand she tried to unclasp his fingers. The shabby man was brooding over his folded napkins; the aviator was carefully occupied with his drink. “Dont,” she whispered again. Her body was twisted in her chair and she put her hand out quickly, lest she be dragged out of it, and for a moment they stared at one another—she with wide and mute terror; he bleakly with the cold mask of his face. Then he released her and rose and thrust his chair back.

“Come on, you,” he said to the shabby man. He drew a wad of bills from his pocket and laid one beside her on the table. “That’ll get you home,” he said. But she sat nursing the wrist he had held, watching him without a sound. The aviator was discreetly interested in the bottom of his glass. “Come on,” Bayard repeated to the shabby man, and the other rose and followed him.

In a small alcove Harry Mitchell sat. On his table too were bottles and glasses, and he now sat slumped in his chair, his eyes closed and his bald head rosy with perspiration in the glow of an electric candle. Beside him was a woman who turned and looked at Bayard with blazing and harried desperation; above them stood a waiter with a head like a monk’s, and as Bayard passed he saw that the diamond was missing from Harry’s tie and he heard their bitter suppressed voices as their hands struggled over something on the table beyond the discreet shelter of their bodies, and as he and his companion reached the exit the woman’s voice rose with a burst of filthy rage into a shrill hysterical scream cut sharply off, as if someone had clapped a hand over her mouth.

——

The next day Miss Jenny drove into town and wired him again. But when this wire was dispatched, Bayard was sitting in an aeroplane on the tarmac of the government field at Dayton, while the shabby man hovered and darted here and there in a frenzied manner and a group of army pilots stood nearby, soberly noncommittal. The machine looked like any other biplane, save that there were no visible cables between the planes, which were braced from within by wires on a system of springs; hence, motionless on the ground, dihedral was negative. The theory was that while in level flight dihedral would be eliminated for speed, and when the machine was banked, side pressure would automatically increase dihedral for manoeuver-ability. The cockpit was set well back toward the fin. “So you can see the wings when they buckle,” the man who lent him a helmet and goggles, said drily. “It’s an old pair,” he added. Bayard glanced at him, coldly humorless. “Look here, Sartoris,” the other said. “Let that crate alone. These birds show up here every week with something that will revolutionize flying, some new kind of mantrap that flies fine—on paper. If the C.O. wont give him a pilot (and you know we try anything here that has a prop on it) you can gamble it’s a washout.”

But Bayard took the helmet and goggles and went on toward the hangar. The group followed him and stood quietly about with their bleak, wind-gnawed faces while the engine was warming up. But when Bayard got in and settled his goggles, the man who had lent them to him approached and put something in his lap. “Here,” he said brusquely. “Take this.” It was a woman’s garter, and Bayard picked it up and gave it back to him.

“I wont need it,” he said. “Thanks just the same.”

“Well. You know your own business. But if you ever let her get her nose down, you’re going to lose everything but the wheels.”

“I know,” Bayard answered. “I’ll keep her up.” The shabby man rushed up again, still talking. “Yes, yes,” Bayard replied impatiently. “You told me all that before. Contact.” A mechanic spun the propeller over, and as the machine moved out toward midfield the shabby man still clung to the cockpit rim and shouted at him. Soon he was running to keep up and still shouting, and Bayard lifted his hands off the cowling and opened the throttle. But when he reached the end of the field and turned into the wind the man was running toward him and waving his arms. Bayard opened the throttle full and the machine lurched forward and when he passed the shabby man in midfield the tail was high and the plane rushed on in long bounds, and he had a fleeting glimpse of the man’s wild arms and his open mouth as the bounding ceased.

From the V strut out each wing tipped and swayed, and he jockeyed the thing carefully on, gaining height. He realized that there was a certain point beyond which his own speed was likely to rob him of lifting surface. He had about two thousand feet now, and he turned, and in doing so he found that aileron pressure utterly negatived the inner plane’s dihedral and doubled that of the outer one, and he found himself in the wildest skid he had seen since his hun days. The machine not only skidded: it flung its tail up like a diving whale and the air speed indicator leaped thirty miles past the dead line the inventor had given him. He was headed back toward the field now, in a shallow dive, and he pulled the stick back.

The wingtips buckled sharply; he flung the stick forward just before they ripped completely off, and he knew that only the speed of the dive kept him from falling like an inside out umbrella. And the speed was increasing: already he had overshot the field, under a thousand feet high. He pulled the stick back again; again the wingtips buckled and he slapped the
stick over and kicked again into that wild skid, to check his speed. Again the machine swung its tail in a soaring arc, but this time the wings came off and he ducked his head automatically as one of them slapped viciously past it and crashed into the tail, shearing it too away.

That day Narcissa’s child was born, and the following day Simon drove Miss Jenny into town and set her down before the telegraph office and held the horses champing and tossing with gallant restiveness by a slight and surreptitious tightening of the reins, while beneath the tophat and the voluminous duster, he contrived by some means to actually strut sitting down. So Dr Peabody found him when he came along the street in the June sunlight, in his slovenly alpaca coat, carrying a newspaper.

“You look like a frog, Simon,” he said. “Where’s Miss Jenny?”

“Yessuh,” Simon agreed. “Yessuh. Dey’s swellin’ en rejoicin’ now. De little marster done arrive’. Yessuh, de little marster done arrive’ and de ole times comin’ back.”

“Where’s Miss Jenny?” Dr Peabody repeated impatiently.

“She in dar, tellygraftin’ dat boy ter come on back hyer whar he belong at.” Dr Peabody turned away and Simon watched him, a little fretted at his apathy in the face of the event. “Takes it jes’ like trash,” Simon mused aloud, with annoyed disparagement. “Nummine; we gwine wake ’um all up, now. Yessuh, de olden times comin’ back ergain, sho’. Like in Mars’ John’s time, when de Cunnel wuz de young marster en de niggers fum de quawtuhs gethered on de front lawn,
wishin’ Mistis en de little marster well.” And he watched Dr Peabody enter the door and through the plate glass window he saw him approach Miss Jenny as she stood at the counter with her message.

“Come home you fool and see your family or I will have you arrested” the message read in her firm, lucid script. “It’s more than ten words,” she told the operator, “but that dont matter this time. He’ll come now: you watch. Or I’ll send the sheriff after him, sure as his name’s Sartoris.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the operator said. He was apparently having trouble reading it, and he looked up after a moment and was about to speak when Miss Jenny remarked his distraction and repeated the message briskly.

“And make it stronger than that, if you want to,” she added.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said again, and he ducked down behind his desk, and presently and with a little mounting curiosity and impatience Miss Jenny leaned across the counter with a silver dollar in her fingers and watched him count the words three times in a sort of painful flurry.

“What’s the matter, young man?” she demanded. “The government dont forbid the mentioning of a day old child in a telegram, does it?”

The operator looked up. “Yes, ma’am, it’s all right,” he said at last, and she gave him the dollar, and as he sat holding it and Miss Jenny watched him with yet more impatience, Dr Peabody came in and touched her arm.

“Come away, Jenny,” he said.

“Good morning,” she said, turning at his voice. “Well, it’s about time you took notice. This is the first Sartoris you’ve been a day late on in how many years, Loosh? And soon as I get that fool boy home, it’ll be like old times again, as Simon says.”

“Yes. Simon told me. Come along here.”

“Let me get my change.” She turned to the counter, where
the operator stood with the message in one hand and the coin in the other. “Well, young man? Aint a dollar enough?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he repeated, turning upon Dr Peabody his dumb, distracted eyes. Dr Peabody reached fatly and took the message and the coin from him.

“Come along, Jenny,” he said again. Miss Jenny stood motionless for a moment, in her black silk dress and her black bonnet set squarely on her head, staring at him with her piercing old eyes that saw so much and so truly. Then she walked steadily to the door and stepped into the street and waited until he joined her, and her hand was steady too as she took the folded paper he offered. MISSISSIPPI AVIATOR it said in discreet capitals, and she returned it to him immediately and from her waist she took a small sheer handkerchief and wiped her fingers lightly.

“I dont have to read it,” she said. “They never get into the papers but one way. And I know that he was somewhere he had no business being, doing something that wasn’t any affair of his.”

“Yes,” Dr Peabody said. He followed her to the carriage and put his hands clumsily upon her as she mounted.

“Dont paw me, Loosh,” she snapped. “I’m not a cripple.” But he supported her elbow with his huge, gentle hand until she was seated, then he stood with his hat off while Simon laid the linen robe across her knees.

“Here,” he said, and extended her the silver dollar and she returned it to her bag and clicked it shut and wiped her fingers again on her handkerchief.

“Well,” she said. Then: “Thank God that’s the last one. For a while, anyway. Home, Simon.”

Simon sat magnificently, but under the occasion he unbent a little. “When you gwine come out en see de young marster, Doctuh?”

“Soon, Simon,” he answered, and Simon clucked to the horses and wheeled away with a flourish, his hat tilted and the whip caught smartly back. Dr Peabody stood in the street, a shapeless hogshead of a man in a shabby alpaca coat, his hat in one hand and the folded newspaper and the yellow unsent message in the other, until Miss Jenny’s straight slender back and the squarely indomitable angle of her bonnet had passed from sight.

But that was not the last one. One morning a week later, Simon was found in a negro cabin in town, his grizzled head crushed in by a blunt instrument anonymously wielded.

“In whose house?” Miss Jenny demanded into the telephone. In that of a woman named Meloney Harris, the voice told her. Meloney Me Belle Mitchell’s face flashed before her mind, and she remembered: the mulatto girl whose smart apron and cap and lean shining shanks had lent such an air to Belle’s parties, and who had quit Belle in order to set up a beauty parlor. Miss Jenny thanked the voice and hung up the receiver.

“The old grayheaded reprobate,” she said, and she went into old Bayard’s office and sat down. “So that’s where that church money went that he ‘put out.’ I wondered.……” She sat stiffly and uncompromisingly erect in her chair, her hands idle on her lap. Well, that
is
the last one of ’em, she thought. But no, he was hardly a Sartoris: he had at least some shadow of a reason, while the others.…… “I think,” Miss Jenny said, who had not spent a day in bed since she was forty years old, “that I’ll be sick for a while.”

And she did just exactly that. Went to bed, where she lay propped on pillows in a frivolous lace cap, and would permit no doctor to see her save Dr Peabody who called once informally
and sat sheepishly for thirty minutes while Miss Jenny vented her invalid’s spleen and the recurred anger of the salve fiasco upon him. And here she held daily councils with Isom and Elnora, and at the most unexpected moments she would storm with unimpaired vigor from her window at Isom and Caspey in the yard beneath.

The child and the placid, gaily turbaned mountain who superintended his hours, spent most of the day in this room, and presently Narcissa herself; and the three of them would sit for rapt murmurous hours in a sort of choral debauch of abnegation while the object of it slept digesting, waked, stoked himself anew and slept again.

“He’s a Sartoris, all right,” Miss Jenny said, “but an improved model. He hasn’t got that wild look of ’em. I believe it was the name. Bayard. We did well to name him Johnny.”

“Yes,” Narcissa said, watching her sleeping son with grave and tranquil serenity.

And there Miss Jenny stayed until her while was up. Three weeks it was. She set the date before she went to bed and held to it stubbornly, refusing even to rise and attend the christening. That day fell on Sunday. It was late in June and jasmine drifted into the house in steady waves. Narcissa and the nurse, in an even more gaudy turban, had brought the baby, bathed and garnished and scented in his ceremonial robes, in to her, and later she heard them drive away in the carriage, and then the house was still again. The curtains stirred peacefully at the windows, and all the peaceful scents of summer came up on the sunny breeze, and sounds—birds, somewhere a Sabbath bell, and Elnora’s voice, chastened a little by her recent bereavement but still rich and mellow as she went about getting dinner. She sang sadly and endlessly and without words as
she moved about the kitchen, but she broke off short when she looked around and saw Miss Jenny looking a little frail but dressed and erect as ever, in the door.