“Well, I’ve had ’em around so long I don’t know how to get shut of ’em, ’less I drown ’em. Feedin’ ’em is the main trouble, though. Takes everything I can make. If it wasn’t for them, I’d ’a’ quit practicin’ long ago. That’s the reason I dine out whenever I can: every time I get a free meal, it’s the same as a half holiday to a workin’ man.”
“How many have you got, Doctor?” Narcissa asked.
“I don’t rightly know,” he answered. “I got six or seven registered ones, but I don’t know how many scrubs I have. I see a new yearlin’ every day or so.” Simon was watching him with rapt interest.
“You ain’t got no extry room out dar, is you, Doctuh?” he asked. “Here I slaves all de livelong day, keepin’ ’um in vittles en sech.”
“Can you eat cold fish and greens every day?” Dr. Peabody asked him solemnly.
“Well, suh,” Simon answered doubtfully, “I ain’t so sho’ erbout dat, I burnt out on fish once, when I wuz a young man, en I ain’t had no right stomach fer it since.”
“Well, that’s all we have to eat, out home.”
“All right, Simon,” Miss Jenny said. Simon was propped statically against the sideboard, watching Dr. Peabody with musing astonishment.
“En you keeps yo’ size on cole fish en greens? Gentlemun, I’d be a bone-rack on dem kine o’ vittles in two weeks, I sholy would.”
“Simon!” Miss Jenny raised her voice sharply. “Why won’t you let him alone, Loosh, so he can ’tend to his business?” Simon came abruptly untranced and removed the fish. Beneath the table Narcissa slipped her hand in Horace’s again.
“Lay off of Doc, Aunt Jenny,” young Bayard said. He touched his grandfather’s arm. “Can’t you make her let Doc alone?”
“What’s he doing, Jenny?” old Bayard asked. Won’t he eat his dinner?”
“None of us’ll get anything to eat if he sits there and talks to Simon about cold fish and turnip greens,” Miss Jenny replied.
“I think you’re mean, to treat him like you do, Miss Jenny,” Narcissa said.
“Well, it gives me something to be thankful for,” Dr. Peabody answered, “that you never took me when you had the chance. I went and proposed to Jenny once,” he told them.
“You old gray-headed liar,” Miss Jenny said, “you never did any such a thing!”
“Oh, yes, I did. Only I did it on John Sartoris’ account. He said he was havin’ mo’ trouble than he could stand with politics outside his home. And, do you know—”
“Loosh Peabody, you’re the biggest liar in the world!”
“—I pretty near had her persuaded for a while? It was that first spring them weeds she brought out here from Ca’lina bloomed, and there was a moon and we were in the garden and there was a mockin’bird—”
“No such thing!” Miss Jenny shouted. “There never was—”
“Look at her face, if you believe I’m lyin,’” Dr. Peabody said.
“Look at her face,” young Bayard echoed rudely. “She’s blushing!”
And she was blushing, but her cheeks were like banners, and her head was still high amid the gibing laughter. Narcissa rose and came to her and laid her arm about her trim erect shoulders. “You all hush this minute,” she said. “You’d better consider yourselves lucky that any of us ever marry you, and flattered even when we refuse.”
“I am flattered,” Dr. Peabody rejoined, “or I wouldn’t be a widower now.”
“Who wouldn’t be a widower, the size of a hogshead and living on cold fish and turnip greens?” Miss Jenny said. “Sit down, honey. I ain’t scared of any man alive.”
Narcissa resumed her seat, and Simon appeared again, with Isom in procession now, and for’ the next few minutes they moved steadily between kitchen and dining room with a roast turkey and a smoked ham and a dish of quail and another of squirrels, and a baked ’possum in a bed of sweet potatoes and squash and pickled beets, and sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes, and rice and hominy, and hot biscuit and beaten biscuit and delicate long sticks of cornbread, and strawberry and pear preserves, and quince and apple jelly, and stewed cranberries and pickled peaches.
Then they ceased talking for a while and really ate, glancing now and then across the table at one another in a rosy glow of amicability and steamy odors. From time to time Isom entered with hot bread, while Simon stood overlooking the field somewhat as Caesar must have stood looking down into Gaul, once it was well in hand, or the Lord God Himself when He contemplated his latest chemical experiment and saw that it was good.
“After this, Simon,” Dr. Peabody said, and he sighed a little, “I reckon I can take you on and find you a little side meat now and then.”
“I ’speck you kin,” Simon agreed, watching them like an eagle-eyed general who rushes reserves to the threatened points, pressing more food upon them as they faltered. But even Dr. Peabody allowed himself vanquished after a time, and then Simon brought in pies of three kinds, and a small, deadly plum pudding, and a cake baked cunningly with whisky and nuts and fruits and ravishing as odors of heaven and treacherous and fatal as sin; and at last, with an air sibylline and solemnly profound, a bottle of port: The sun lay hazily in the glowing west, falling levelly through the windows and on the silver arrayed on the sideboard, dreaming in mellow gleams among its placid rotundities and on the colored panes in the fanlight high in the western wall.
But that was November, the season of hazy, languorous days, when the first flush of autumn is over and winter beneath the sere horizon breathes yet a spell—November, when like a shawled matron among her children, the year dies peacefully, without pain and of no disease. Early in December the rains set in and the year turned gray beneath the season of dissolution and of death. All night long and all day it whispered on the roof and along the eaves. The trees shed their final stubborn leaves in it and gestured their black and sorrowful branches against ceaseless vistas; only a lone hickory at the foot of the park kept its leaves, gleaming like a sodden flame on the eternal azure, and beyond the valley the hills were hidden by a swaddling of rain.
Almost daily, despite Miss Jenny’s strictures and commands and the grave protest in Narcissa’s eyes, Bayard went forth with a shotgun and the two dogs, to return just before dark, wet to the skin. And cold; his lips would be chill on hers and his eyes bleak and haunted, and in the yellow firelight of their room she would cling to him, or lie crying quietly in the darkness beside his rigid body, with a ghost between them.
“Look here,” Miss Jenny said, coming on her as she sat brooding before the fire in old Bayard’s den. “You spend too much time this way; you’re getting moony. Stop worrying about him: he’s spent half of his life soaking wet, yet neither one of ’em ever had a cold even, that I can remember.”
“Hasn’t he?” she answered listlessly. Miss Jenny stood beside her chair, watching her keenly. Then she laid her hand on Narcissa’s head, quite gently for a Sartoris.
“Are you worrying because maybe he don’t love you like you think he ought to?”
“It isn’t that,” she answered. “He doesn’t love anybody. He won’t even love the baby. He doesn’t seem to be glad, or sorry, or anything.”
“No,” Miss Jenny agreed. The fire crackled and leaped among the resinous logs. Beyond the gray window the day dissolved endlessly. “Listen,” Miss Jenny said abruptly. “Don’t you ride in that car with him any more. You hear?”
“No. It won’t make him drive slowly. Nothing will.”
“Of course not. Nobody believes it will, not even his grandfather. He goes along for the same reason that boy himself does. Sartoris. It’s in the blood. Savages, everyone of ’em. No earthly use to anybody.” Together they gazed into the leaping flames, Miss Jenny’s hand still lying on Narcissa’s head. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“You didn’t do it. Nobody got me into it. I did it myself.”
“
H’m,” Miss Jenny said. And then: “Would you do it over again?” The other did not reply, and she repeated the question. “Would you?”
“Yes,” Narcissa answered. “Don’t you know I would?” Again there was silence between them, in which without words they sealed their hopeless pact with that fine and passive courage of women. Narcissa rose.
“I believe I’ll go in and spend the day with Horace, if you don’t mind,” she said.
“All right,” Miss Jenny agreed. “I believe I would, too. Horace probably needs a little looking after, by now. He looked sort of gaunt when he was out here last week. Like he wasn’t getting proper food.”
When she entered the kitchen door Eunice, the cook, turned from the bread board and lifted her hands in a soft, dark gesture. “Well, Miss Narcy,” she said, “we ain’t seed you in a mont’. Is you come all de way in de rain?”
“I came in the carriage. It was too wet for the car.” She came into the room. Eunice watched her with grave pleasure. “How are you all getting along?”
“He gits enough to eat,” Eunice answered; “I sees to dat. But I has to make him eat it. He needs you back here.”
“I’m here, for the day, anyhow. What have you got for dinner?” Together they lifted lids and peered into the simmering vessels on the stove and in the oven. “Oh, chocolate pie!”
“I has to toll ’im wid dat,” Eunice explained. “He’ll eat anything, ef I jes’ makes ’im a chocolate pie,” she added proudly.
“I bet he does,” Narcissa agreed. “Nobody can make chocolate pies like yours.”
“Dis one ain’t turnt out so well,” Eunice said, deprecatory. “I ain’t so pleased wid it.”
“Why, Eunice! It’s perfect.”
“No’rn, it ain’t up to de mark,” Eunice insisted. But she beamed, gravely diffident, and for a few minutes the two of them talked amicably while Narcissa pried into cupboards and boxes.
Then she returned to the house and mounted to her room. The, dressing table was bare of its intimate silver and crystal, and the drawers were empty, and the entire room, with its air of still and fading desolation, reproached her. Chill too; there had been no fire in the grate since last spring, and on the table beside the bed, forgotten and withered and dead, was a small bunch of flowers in a blue vase. Touching them, they crumbled in her fingers, leaving a stain, and the water in the vase smelled of rank decay. She opened the window and threw them out.
The room was too chill to stop in long, and she decided to ask Eunice to build a fire on the hearth for the comfort of that part of her which still lingered here, soberly and a little sorrowful in the chill and reproachful desolation. At her chest of drawers she paused again and remembered those letters, fretfully and with a little musing alarm, deprecating anew her carelessness in not destroying them. But maybe she had, and so she entered again into the closed circle of her bewilderment and first fear, trying to remember what she had done with them. But she was certain that she had left them in the drawer with her under things, positive that she had put them there. Yet she had never been able to find them, nor had Eunice nor Horace seen them. The day she had missed them was the day before her wedding, when she had packed her things. That day she had missed them, finding in their stead one in a different handwriting, which she did not remember having received. The gist of it was plain enough, although she had not understood some of it literally. But on that day she had read it with tranquil detachment: it and all it brought to mind was definitely behind her now. And lacking even this, she would not have been shocked if she had comprehended it. Curious a little, perhaps, at some of the words, but that is all.
But what she had done with those other letters she could not remember, and not being able to gave her moments of definite fear when she considered the possibility that people might learn that someone had had such thoughts about her and put them into words. Well, they were gone; there was nothing to do save hope that she had destroyed them as she had the last one, or if she had not, to trust that they would never be found. Yet that brought back the original distaste and dread: the possibility that the intactness of her deep and heretofore inviolate serenity might be the sport of circumstance; that she must trust to chance against the eventuality of a stranger casually picking a stray bit of paper from the ground. . . .
But she would put this firmly aside, for the time being, at least. This should be Horace’s day, and her own too—a surcease from that ghost-ridden dream to which she clung, waking. She descended the stairs. There was a fire in the living room. It had burned down to embers, however, and she put coal on it and punched it to a blaze. That would be the first thing he’d see when he entered; perhaps he’d wonder, perhaps he’d know before he entered, having sensed her presence. She considered telephoning him, and she mused indecisively for a moment before the fire, then decided to let it be a surprise. But supposing he didn’t come home to dinner because of the rain. She considered this, and pictured him walking along a street in the rain, and immediately and with instinctive foreknowledge, she went to the closet beneath the stairs and opened the door. It was as she had known; his overcoat and his raincoat both hung there, and the chances were he didn’t even have an umbrella; and again irritation and exasperation and untroubled affection welled within her and it was as it had been of old again, and all that had since come between them rolled away like clouds.
Heretofore her piano had always been rolled into the living room when cold weather came. But now it stood yet in the smaller alcove. There was a fireplace here, but no fire had been lighted yet, and the room was chilly. Beneath her hands the cold keys gave forth a sluggish chord, accusing, reproving too, and she returned to the fire and stood where she could see, through the window, the drive beneath its somber, dripping cedars. The small clock on the mantel behind her chimed twelve, and she went to the window and stood with her nose touching the chill glass and her breath frosting it over. Soon, now; he was erratic in his hours, but never tardy, and every time an umbrella came into sight her heart leaped a little. But it was not he, and she followed the bearer’s plodding passage until he shifted the umbrella enough for her to recognize him, and so she did not see Horace until he was halfway up the drive. His hat was turned down about his face and his coat collar was hunched to his ears, and as she had known, he didn’t even have an umbrella.
“Oh, you idiot,” she said and ran to the door and through the curtained glass she saw his shadowy shape come leaping up the steps. He flung the door open and entered, whipping his sodden hat against his leg, and so did not see her until she stepped forth. “You idiot,” she said, “where’s your raincoat?”
For a moment he stared at her with his wild and diffident unrepose; then he said “Narcy!” and his face lighted and he swept her into his wet arms.
“Don’t” she cried. “You’re wet!” But he swung her from the floor, against his sopping chest, repeating “Narcy, Narcy”; then his cold nose was against her face and she tasted rain.
“Narcy,” he said again, hugging her, and she ceased resisting and clung to him. Then abruptly he released her and jerked his head up and stared at her with sober intensity. “Narcy,” he said, still staring at her, “has that surly blackguard—”
“No, of course not,” she answered sharply. “Have you gone crazy?” Then she clung to him again, wet clothes and all, as though she would never let him go. “Oh, Horry,” she said, “I’ve been a beast to you!”
3
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. The stalled Ford swam sickeningly into view again as the big car slewed on the greasy surface, its declutched engi
ne roaring. Then the Ford 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 comer of his eye he could see the old fellow’s hand clutching the top of the door. Now they were facing the bluff on which the cemetery lay; directly above them John Sartoris’ effigy lifted its florid stone gesture and from amid motionless cedars gazed out on 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 downhill again, with never a slackening of its speed. But still it would not come into the ruts, and it had lost the crown of the road, and although they had almost reached the foot of the hill, Bayard saw that 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, in which all sensation of motion was lost. Then scrub cedar burst crackling about them and whipping branches of it exploded on the radiator and slapped viciously at them as they leaned with braced feet, and the car slewed in a long bounce. Another vacuumlike 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 Bayard threw out his arm just in time to keep the other from crashing through the windshield. “Hang on,” he shouted. The car had never faltered and he dragged the leaping wheel over and swung it down the ravine and opened the engine, 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 on to the road again. Bayard brought it to a stop.