It was trimmed with white and it had mullioned casements brought out from England; along the veranda eaves and above the door grew a wistaria vine like heavy tarred rope and thicker than a man’s wrist. The lower casements stood open on gently billowing curtains: on the sill you expected to see a scrubbed wooden bowl, or at least an immaculate and supercilious cat. But the window sill held only a wicker work basket from which, like a drooping poinsettia, spilled an end at patchwork in crimson and white; and in the doorway Aunt Sally, a potty little woman in a lace cap, leaned on a gold-headed ebony walking stick.
Just as it should be, and Horace turned and looked back at his sister crossing the drive with the parcels he had forgotten again.
He banged and splashed happily in his bathroom, shouting through the door to his sister where she sat on his bed. His discarded khaki lay on a chair, holding yet through long association, in its harsh drab folds, something at that taut and delicate futility of his. On the marble-topped dresser lay the crucible and tubes at his glass-blowing outfit, the first one he had bought, and beside it the vase he had blown on shipboard—a small chaste shape in clear glass, not four inches tall, fragile as a silver lily and incomplete.
“They work in caves,” he was shouting through the door, “down flights of stairs underground. You feel water seeping under your foot while you’re reaching for the next step; and when you put your hand out to steady yourself against the wall, it’s wet when you take it away. It feels just like blood.”
“Horace!”
“Yes, magnificent. And ’way ahead you see the glow. All of a sudden the tunnel comes glimmering out of nothing; then you see the furnace, with things rising and falling before it, shutting off the light, and the walls go glimmering again. At first they’re just shapeless things hunching about. Antic, with shadows on the bloody walls, red shadows. A glare, and black shapes like paper dolls weaving and rising and falling in front of it, like a magic-lantern shutter. And then a face comes out, blowing, and other faces sort of swell out of the red dark like painted balloons.
“And the things themselves. Sheerly and tragically beautiful. Like preserved flowers, you know. Macabre and inviolate; purged and purified as bronze, yet fragile as soap bubbles. Sounds of pipes crystallized. Flutes and oboes, but mostly reeds. Oaten reeds. Damn it, they bloom like flowers right before your eyes. Midsummer Night’s Dream to a salamander.” His voice became unintelligible, soaring into measured phrases which she did not recognize, but which from the pitch of his voice she knew to be Milton’s archangels in their sonorous plunging ruin.
He emerged at last, in a white shirt and serge trousers, but still borne aloft on his flaming verbal wings, and while his voice chanted in measured syllables she fetched a pair of shoes from the closet, and while she stood holding the shoes in her hands he ceased chanting and touched her face again with his hands after that fashion of a child.
At supper Aunt Sally broke into his staccato babbling: “Did you bring your Snopes back with you?” she asked. This Snopes was a young man, member of a seemingly inexhaustible family which for the last ten years had been moving to town in driblets from a small settlement known as Frenchman’s Bend. Flem, the first Snopes, had appeared unheralded one day behind the counter of a small restaurant on a side street, patronized by country folk. With this foothold and like Abraham of old, he brought his blood and legal kin household by household, individual by individual, into town, and established them where they could gain money. Flem himself was presently manage’ of the city light and wale, plant, and for the following few years he was a sort of handy man to the municipal government; and three years ago, to old Bayard’s profane astonishment and unconcealed annoyance, be became vice president of the Sartoris bank, where already a relation of his was a bookkeeper.
He still retained the restaurant, and the canvas tent in the rear of it, in which he and his wife and baby had passed the first few months of their residence in town; and it served as an alighting-place for incoming Snopeses, from which they spread to small third-rate businesses of various kinds-grocery stores, barbershops (there was one, an invalid of some sort, who operated a second-hand peanut roaster) where they multiplied and flourished. The older residents from their Jeffersonian houses and genteel stores and offices, looked on with amusement at first. But this was long since become something like consternation.
The Snopes to which Aunt Sally referred was named Montgomery Ward, and just before the draft law went into operation in ’17 he applied to a recruiting officer in Memphis and was turned down for military service because of his heart. Later, to everyone’s surprise, particularly that of Horace Benbow’s friends, he departed with Horace to a position in the Y.M.C.A. Later still, it was told of him that he had traveled all the way to Memphis on that day when he had offered for service, with a plug of chewing tobacco beneath his left armpit. But he and his patron were already departed when that story got out.
“Did you bring your Snopes back with you?” Aunt Sally asked.
“No,” he answered, and his thin, nerve-sick face clouded over with a fine cold distaste. “I was very much disappointed in him. I don’t even care to talk about it.”
“Anybody could have told you that when you left.”
Aunt Sally chewed slowly and steadily above her plate. Horace brooded for a moment; his thin hand tightened slowly upon his fork.
“It’s individuals like that, parasites—” he began, but his sister interrupted.
“Who cares about an old Snopes, anyway? Besides, it’s too late at night to talk about the horrors of war.”
Aunt Sally made a moist sound through her food, a sound of vindicated superiority.
“It’s the generals they have nowadays,” she said. “General Johnston or General Forrest wouldn’t have took a Snopes in his army at all.” Aunt Sally was no relation whatever. She lived next door but one with two maiden sisters, one younger and one older than she. She had been in and out of the house ever since Horace and Narcissa could remember, having arrogated to herself certain rights in their lives before they could walk: privileges which were never definitely expressed and of which she never availed herself, yet the mutual admission of whose existence she never permitted to tall into abeyance. She would walk into any room in the house unannounced, and she liked to talk tediously and a little tactlesslv of Horace’s and Narcissa’s infantile ailments. It was said that she had once “made eyes” at Will Benbow, although she was a woman of thirty-four or -five when Will married; and she still spoke of him with a taintly disparaging possessrveness, and of his wite she always spoke pleasantly too. “Julia was a right sweet-natured girl,” she would say.
So when Horace went off to the war Aunt Sally moved over to keep Narcissa company; no other arrangement had ever occurred to any of the three of them; the fact that Narcissa must have Aunt Sally in the house for an indefinite year or two or three appeared as unavoidable as the fact that Horace must go to the war. Aunt Sally was a good old soul, but she lived much in the past, shutting her mind with a bland finality to anything which had occurred since 1901. For her, time had gone out drawn by horses, and into her stubborn and placid vacuum the squealing of automobile brakes had never penetrated. She had a lot of the crudities which old people are entitled to. She liked the sound of her own voice and she didn’t like to be alone at any time, and as she had never got accustomed to the false teeth which she had bought twelve years ago and so never touched them other than to change weekly the water in which they reposed, she ate un prettily of unprepossessing but easily malleable toads.
Narcissa reached her hand beneath the table and touched her brother’s knee again. “I am glad you’re home, Horry.”
He looked at her quickly, and the cloud faded from his face as suddenly as it had come, and his spirit slipped, like a swimmer into a tideless sea, into the serene constancy of her affection again.
He was a lawyer, principally through a sense
of duty to the family tradition, and though he had no particular affinity to it other than a love for printed words, for the dwelling-places of books, he contemplated returning to his musty office with a glow of . . . not eagerness, no: of deep and abiding unreluctance, almost of pleasure. The meaning of peace. Old unchanging days; unwinged perhaps, but undisastrous, too. You don’t see it, feel it, save with perspective. Fireflies had not yet come, and the cedars flowed unbroken on either hand down to the street, like a curving ebony wave with rigid unbreaking crests pointed on the sky. Light fell outward from the window, across the porch and on a bed of cannas, hardy, bronze-like—none of your flower-like fragility, theirs; and within the room Aunt Sally’s quavering monotone. Narcissa was there too, beside the lamp with a book, filling the room with her still and constant presence like the odor of jasmine, watching the door through which he had passed; and Horace stood on the veranda with his cold pipe, surrounded by that cool astringency of cedars like another presence. “The meaning of peace,” he said to himself once more, releasing the grave words one by one within the cool bell of silence into which he had come at last again, hearing them linger with a dying fall pure as silver and crystal struck lightly together.
“How’s Belle?” he asked on the evening of his arrival.
“They’re all right,” his sister answered. “They have a new car.”
“Dare say,” Horace agreed with detachment. “The war should certainly have accomplished that much.”
Aunt Sally had left them at last and tapped her slow bedward way. Horace stretched his serge legs luxuriously, and for a while he ceased striking matches to his stubborn pipe and sat watching his sister’s dark head bent above the magazine upon her knees, lost from lesser and inconstant things. Her hair was smoother than any reposing wings, sweeping with burnished unrebellion to a simple knot low in her neck.
“Belle’s a rotten correspondent,” he said. “Like all women.”
She turned a page, without looking up.
“Did you write to her often?”
“It’s because they realize that letters are only good to bridge intervals between actions, like the interludes in Shakespeare’s plays,” he went on, oblivious. “And did you ever know a woman who read Shakespeare without skipping the interludes? Shakespeare himself knew that, so he didn’t put any women in the interludes. Let the men bombast to one another’s echoes while the ladies are backstage washing the dinner dishes or putting the children to bed.”
“I never knew a woman that read Shakespeare at all,” Narcissa corrected. “He talks too much.”
Horace rose and stood above her and patted her dark head.
“O profundity,” he said, “you have reduced all wisdom to a phrase, and measured your sex by the stature of a star.”
“Well, they don’t,” she repeated, raising her face.
“No? Why don’t they?” He struck another match to his pipe, watching her across his cupped hands as gravely and with poised eagerness, like a striking bird. “Your Arlens and Sabatinis talk a lot, and nobody ever had more to say and more trouble saying it than old Dreiser.”
“But they have secrets,” she explained. “Shakespeare doesn’t have any secrets. He tells everything.”
“I see. Shakespeare had no sense of discrimination and no instinct for reticence. In other words, he wasn’t a gentleman,” he suggested.
“Yes. . . . That’s what I mean.”
“And so, to be a gentleman, you must have secrets.”
“Oh, you make me tired.” She returned to her magazine and he sat beside her on the couch and took her hand in his and stroked it upon his cheek and upon his wild hair.
“It’s like walking through a twilit garden,” he said. “The flowers you know are all there, in their shifts and with their hair combed out for the night, but you know all of them. So you don’t bother ’em, you just walk on and sort of stop and turn over a leaf occasionally, a leaf you hadn’t noticed before; perhaps you find a violet under it, or a bluebell or a lightning bug; perhaps only another leaf or a blade of grass. But there’s always a drop of dew on it.” He continued to stroke her hand upon his face. With her other hand she turned the magazine slowly on, listening to him with fond and serene detachment.
“Did you write to Belle often?” she repeated. “What did you say to her?”
“I wrote what she wanted to read. What all women want in letters. People are really entitled to half of what they think they should have.”
“What did you tell her?” Narcissa persisted, turning the pages slowly, her passive hand in his, following the stroking movement of his.
“I told her I was unhappy. Perhaps I was,” he added. His sister freed her hand quietly and laid it on the page. He said:
“I admire Belle. She’s so cannily stupid. Once I feared her. Perhaps . . . No, I don’t. I am immune to destruction: I have a magic. Which is a good sign that I am due for it, say the sages,” he added. “But then, acquired wisdom is a dry thing; it has a way of crumbling to dust where a sheer and blind coursing of stupid sap is impervious.” He sat without touching her, in rapt and instantaneous repose. “Not like yours, O Serene,” he said, waking again. Then he tell to saying “Dear old Narcy,” and again he took her hand. It did not withdraw; neither did it wholly surrender.
“I don’t think you ought to say I’m dull so often, Horry,” she said.
“Neither do I,” he agreed. “But I must take some sort of revenge on perfection.”
Later she lay in her dark room. Across the corridor Aunt Sally snored with placid regularity; in the adjoining room Horace lay while that wild, fantastic futility of his voyaged m lonely regions of its own beyond the moon, about meadows nailed with firmamented stars to the ultimate root of things, where unicorns filled the neighing air with galloping, or grazed or lay supine in golden-hooted repose.
Horace was seven when she was born. In the background on her sober babyhood were three beings—a lad with a wild, thin face and an unflagging aptitude for tribulation; a darkly gallant shape romantic with smuggled edibles, with strong, hard hands that smelled always of a certain thrilling carbolic soap—a being something like Omnipotence but without awesomeness; and lastly a gentle figure without legs or any inference of locomotion whatever, like a minor shrine, surrounded always by an aura of gentle melancholy and an endless and delicate manipulation of colored silken thread. This last figure was constant with gentle and melancholy unassertion; the second revolved in an orbit which bore it at regular intervals into outer space, then returned it with its strong and jolly virility into her intense world again. But the first she had made her own by a sober and maternal perseverance, and so by the time she was five or six people coerced Horace by threatening to tell Narcissa on him.
Julia Benbow died genteelly when Narcissa was seven, had been removed from their lives as a small sachet of lavender might be removed from a chest of linen, leaving a delicate lingering impalpability, and through the intense maturity of seven and eight and nine she cajoled and commanded the other two. Then Horace was in school at Sewanee and later at Oxford, from which he returned just in time to see Will Benbow Join his wife among pointed cedars and carven doves and other serene marble shapes; later Horace was separated from her again by a stupid mischancing of human affairs.
But now he lay in the adjoining room, voyaging in safe and glittering regions beyond the moon, and she lay in her dark bed, quiet, peaceful, a little too peaceful to sleep.
2
He was settled soon and easily into the routine of days between his office and his home. The musty, solemn familiarity of calf-bound and never-violated volumes, on whose dusty bindings prints of Will Benbow’s dead fingers might probably yet be found; a little tennis in the afternoons, usually on Harry Mitchell’s fine court; cards in the evenings, also with Belle and Harry as a general thing, or again and better still, with the ever-accessible and never-f
ailing magic of printed pages, while his sister sat across the table from him or played softly to herself in the darkened room across the hall. Occasionally men called on her; Horace received them with unfailing courtesy and a little exasperation, and departed soon to tramp about the streets or to read in bed. Dr. Alford came stiffly once or twice a week, and Horace, being somewhat of an amateur casuist, amused himself by blunting delicately feathered metaphysical darts upon the doctor’s bland scientific hide for an hour or so; it would not be until then that they realized that Narcissa had not spoken a word for sixty or seventy or eighty minutes. “That’s why they come to see you,” Horace told her—“For an emotional mud bath.”
Aunt Sally had returned home, with her bag of colored scraps and her false teeth, leaving behind her a fixed impalpability of a nebulous but definite obligation discharged at some personal sacrifice, and a faint odor of old female flesh which faded slowly from the premises, lingering yet in unexpected places so that at times Narcissa, waking and lying for a while in the darkness, in the sensuous pleasure of having Horace home again, imagined that she could hear yet, in the dark myriad silence of the house, Aunt Sally’s genteel and placid snores.
At times it would be so distinct that she would pause suddenly and speak Aunt Sally’s name into an empty room. And sometimes Aunt Sally replied, having availed herself again of her prerogative of coming in at any hour the notion took her, unannounced, to see how they were getting along and to complain querulously of her own household. She was old, too old to react easily to change, and it was hard for her to readjust herself to her sisters’ ways again after her long sojourn in a household where everyone gave in to her regarding all domestic affairs. At home her elder sister ran things in a capable, shrewish fashion; she and the third sister persisted in treating Aunt Sally like the child she had been sixty-five years ago, whose diet and clothing and hours must be rigorously and pettishly supervised.