A small group stood on a corner, and as the wagon passed and preceded by an abrupt scurrying, yellow flame was stenciled on the twilight and the heavy explosion reverberated in sluggish echoes between the silent walls. The mules quickened against the collars and the wagon rattled on. Through the dusk now, from lighted doorways where bells and wreaths hung, voices called with mellow insistence; children’s voices replied, expostulant, reluctantly regretful. Then the station, where a ’bus and four or five cars stood, and Bayard descended and the negro lifted down the sack.
“Much obliged,” Bayard said. “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, white folks.”
In the waiting-room a stove glowed red hot, and about the room stood cheerful groups in sleek furs and overcoats, but he did not enter. He set the sack against the wall and tramped up and down the platform, warming his blood again. In both directions along the tracks green switch-lights were steady in the dusk; a hands-breadth above the western trees the evening star was like an electric bulb in a glass wall. He tramped back and forth, glancing into the ruddy windows, into the waiting-room where the cheerful groups in their furs and overcoats gesticulated with festive and soundless animation and into the colored waiting-room, whose occupants sat patiently and murmurously about the stove in the dingy light. As he turned here a voice spoke diffidently from the shadow beside the door. “Chris’mus gif, boss.” He took a coin from his pocket without stopping. Again from the square a firecracker exploded heavily, and above the trees a rocket arced, hung for a moment, then opened like a fist, spreading its golden and fading fingers on the tranquil indigo sky without a sound.
Then the train came and brought its lighted windows to a jarring halt, and he picked up his sack again and in the midst of a cheerful throng shouting good-byes and holiday greetings and messages to absent ones, he got aboard. Unshaven, in his scarred boots and stained khaki pants, and his shabby, smoke-colored tweed jacket and his disreputable felt hat, he found a vacant seat and stowed the jug away beneath his legs.
Part Five
“. . . and since the essence of spring is loneliness and a little sadness and a sense of mild frustration, I suppose you do get a keener purification when a little nostalgia is added in for good measure. At home I always found myself remembering apple trees or green lanes or the color of the sea in other places, and I’d be sad that I couldn’t be everywhere at once, or that all the spring couldn’t be one spring, like Byron’s ladies’ mouths. But now I seem to be unified and projected upon one single and very definite object, which is something to be said for me, after all.” Horace’s pen ceased and he gazed at the sheet scrawled over with his practically illegible script, while the words he had just written echoed yet in his mind with a little gallant and whimsical sadness, and for the time being he had quitted the desk and the room and the town and all the crude and blatant newness into which his destiny had brought him, and again that wild and fantastic futility of his roamed unchallenged through the lonely region into which it had at last concentrated its conflicting parts. Already the thick cables along the veranda eaves would be budding into small lilac match-points, and with no effort at all he could see the lawn below the cedars, splashed with random narcissi among random jonquils, and gladioli waiting in turn to bloom.
But his body sat motionless, its hand with the arrested pen lying on the scrawled sheet. The paper lay on the yellow varnished surface of his new desk. The chair in which he sat was new too, as was the room with its dead white walls and imitation oak woodwork. All day long the sun fell on it, untempered by any shade. In the days of early spring it had been pleasant, falling as it now did through his western window and across the desk where a white hyacinth bloomed in a bowl of glazed maroon pottery. But as he sat musing, gazing out the window where, beyond a tarred roof that drank heat like a sponge and radiated it, against a brick wall a clump of ragged trees of heaven lifted shabby, diffident bloom, he dreaded the long, hot summer days of sunlight on the roof directly over him: remembered his dim and musty office at home, in which a breeze seemed always to move, with its serried rows of books dusty and undisturbed that seemed to emanate coolness and quietude even on the hottest days. And thinking of this, he was lost again from the harsh newness in which his body sat. The pen moved again.
“Perhaps fortitude is a sorry imitation of something worthwhile, after all, to the so many who burrow along like moles in the dark, or like owls, to whom a candle-flame is a surfeit. But not to those who carry peace along with them as the candle-flame carries light. I have always been ordered by words, but it seems that I can even restore assurance to my own cowardice by cozening it a little. I dare say you cannot read this, as usual, or reading it, it will not mean anything to you. But you will have served your purpose anyway, thou still unravished bride of quietness.”—“Thou wast happier in thy cage, happier?” Horace thought, reading the words he had written and in which, as usual, he was washing one woman’s linen in the house of another. A thin breeze blew suddenly into the room; there was locust on it, faintly sweet, and beneath it the paper stirred on the desk, rousing him, and suddenly, as a man waking, he looked at his watch and replaced it and wrote rapidly:
“We are glad to have little Belle with us. She likes it here; there is a whole family of little girls next door; stair-steps of tow pigtails before whom, it must be confessed, little Belle preens just a little; patronizes them, as is her birthright. Children make all the difference in the world about a house. Too bad agents are not wise enough to provide rented houses with them. Particularly one like little Belle, so grave and shining and sort of irrelevantly and intensely mature, you know. But then, you don’t know her very well, do you? But we are both very glad to have her with us. I believe that Harry”—The pen ceased, and still poised, he sought the words that so rarely eluded him, realizing as he did so that, though one can lie about others with ready and extemporaneous promptitude, to lie about oneself requires deliberation and a careful choice of expression. Then he glanced again at his watch and crossed that out and wrote: “Belle sends love, O Serene,” and blotted it and folded it swiftly into an envelope and addressed and stamped it, and rose and took his hat. By running he could get it on the four o’clock train.
2
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 glamour 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, bu
t 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 don’t 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 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, while the year drew on and the night air drifted in again heavy 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 glamour 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 too she read 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 to her. 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 up the beds and unswaddled 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, of 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 don’t. 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 two men and a girl. 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 someone 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 won’t 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 don’t even need a horse.”
“You don’t know him,” the girl rejoined, and she clutched his hand and struck her body shivering against him, and though his arm tightened and his hand slid down her back a little, it was under cover of the shuffling throng in 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 won’t 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 don’t know,” she repeated. “I—”
The music crashed to a stop; in the sudden silence the shabby man’s voice rose from the near-by table: “—could just get one of these damn yellow-livered pilots to—”