Flags in the Dust

  Julia Benbow died genteelly and irreproachably when Narcissa was seven and Horace fourteen, had been removed from their lives as a small sachet of lavender is removed from a chest of linen, leaving a delicate lingering impalpability; and slept now amid pointed cedars and doves and serene marble shapes. Thus Narcissa acquired two masculine destinies to control and shape, and through the intense maturity of seven and eight and nine she cajoled and threatened and commanded and (very occasionally) stormed them into concurrence. And so through fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, while Horace was first at Sewanee and later at Oxford. Then Will Benbow’s time came, and he joined his wife Julia among the marbles and the cedars and the doves, and the current of her maternalism had now but a single channel. For a time this current was dammed by a stupid mischancing of human affairs, but now Horace was home again and lay now beneath the same roof and the same recurrence of days, and the channel was undammed again.

  “Why don’t you marry, and let that baby look after . himself for a while?” Miss Jenny Du Pre had demanded once, in her cold, abrupt way. Perhaps when she too was eighty, all men would be Sartorises to her, also. But that was a long time away. Sartorises. She thought of Bayard, but briefly, and without any tremor at all. He was now no more than the shadow of a hawk’s flight mirrored fleetingly by the windless surface of pool, and gone; where, the pool knew and cared not, leaving no stain.

  2

  He settled into the routine of days between office and home. The musty, solemn familiarity of calf-bound and never-violated volumes on whose dusty bindings prints of Will Benbow’s dead fingers could yet have been found; a little tennis in the afternoons, usually on Harry Mitchell’s fine court; cards in the evenings, also with Belle and Harry usually, or again and better still, with the ever accessible and never-failing magic of printed pages while his sister beyond the lamp from rum filled the room with that constant untroubling serenity of hers in which his spirit drowsed like a swimmer on a tideless summer sea.

  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 conferred at some personal sacrifice, as was her way, and a faint odor of old female flesh which faded from the rooms slowly, 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 older sister ran things in a capable shrewish fashion; she and the third aster 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.

  “I can’t even go to the bathroom in peace,” she complained querulously. “Pm a good mind to pack up and move back over here, and let ‘em get along the best way they can.” She rocked fretfully in the chair which by unspoken agreement was never disputed her, looking about the room with her bleared old eyes. “That nigger don’t half clean up since I left. That furniture, now...a damp cloth...”

  “I wish you would take her back,” Miss Sophia, the elder aster, told Narcissa. “She’s got so crochety since she’s been with you that there’s no living with her. What’s this I hear Horace’s taken up? Making glassware?”

  His proper crucibles and retorts had arrived intact. At first he had insisted on using the cellar, clearing out the lawn mower and the garden tools and all the accumulate impedimenta, and walling up the windows so as to make a dungeon of it. But Narcissa had finally persuaded him upon the upper floor of the garage and here he had set up his furnace and had had four mishaps and produced one almost perfect vase of clear amber, larger, more richly and chastely serene and which he kept always on his night table and called by his sister’s name in the intervals of apostrophizing both of them impartially in his moments of rhapsody over the realization of the meaning of peace and the unblemished attainment of it, as Thou still unravished bride of quietude.

  At times he found himself suddenly quiet, a little humble in the presence of the happiness of his winged and solitary cage. For a cage it was, barring him from freedom with trivial compulsions; but he desired a cage. A topless cage, of course, that his spirit might wing on short excursions into the blue, but far afield his spirit did not desire to go: its direction was always upward plummeting, for a plummeting fall.

  Still unchanging days. They were doomed days; he knew it, yet for the time being his devious and uncontrollable impulses had become one with the rhythm of things as a swimmer’s counter muscles become one with a current, and cage and all his life grew suave with motion, oblivious of destination. During this period not only did his immediate days become starkly inevitable, but the dead thwarted ones with all the spent and ludicrous disasters which his nature had incurred upon him, grew lustrous in retrospect and without regret, and those to come seemed as undeviating and logical as mathematical formulae beyond an incurious golden veil.

  At Sewanee, where he had gone as his father before him, he had been an honor man in his class. As a Rhodes Scholar he had gone to Oxford, there to pursue the verities and humanities with that waiting law office in a Mississippi country town like a gate in the remote background through which he must someday pass, thinking of it not often and with no immediate perspective, accepting it with neither pleasure nor regret Here, amid the mellow benignance of these walls, was a perfect life, a life accomplishing itself placidly in a region remote from time and into which the world’s noises came only from afar and with only that glamorous remote significance of a parade passing along a street far away; with inferences of brass and tinsel fading beyond far walls, into the changeless sky. Here he developed a reasonably fine discrimination in alcohol and a brilliant tennis game, after his erratic electric fashion; but save for an occasional half sophomoric, half travelling-sales-manish sabbatical to the Continent in company with fellow-countrymen, his life was a golden and purposeless dream, without palpable intent or future with the exception of that law office to which he was reconciled by the sheer and youthful insuperability of distance and time.

  There had come a day on which he stood in that mild pleasurable perplexity in which we regard our belongings and the seemingly inadequate volume of possible packing space, coatless among his chaotic possessions, slowly rubbing the fine unruly devastation of his head About the bedroom bags and boxes gaped, and on the bed, on chairs, on the floor, were spread his clothes—jackets and trousers of all kinds .and all individual as old friends. A servant moved about in the next room and he entered, but the man ignored him with silent and deft efficiency, and he went on to the window. The thin curtains starred to a faint troubling exhalation of late spring. He put their gentle billowing aside and lit a cigarette and idly watched the match fall, its initial outward impulse fading into a wavering reluctance, as though space itself were languid in violation. Someone crossing the quad called up to him indistinguishably. He waved his hand vaguely in reply and sat on the window sill.

  Outward, above and beyond buildings peaceful and gray and old, within and beyond trees in an untarnished and gracious resurgence of green, afternoon was like a blonde woman going slowly in a windless garden; afternoon and June were like blonde sisters in a windless garden—close, approaching without regret the fall of day. Walking a little slower, perhaps; perhaps looking backward, but without sadness, untroubled as cows. Horace sat in the window while the servant methodically reduce
d the chaps of his possessions to the boxes and bags, gazing out across ancient gray roofs, and trees which he had seen in all their seasonal moods, in all moods matching his own. Had he been younger he would have said goodbye to them secretively or defiantly; older, he would have felt neither the desire to nor the impulse to suppress it. So he sat quietly in his window for the last time while the curtains stirred delicately against his hair, brooding upon their dreaming vistas where twilight was slowly finding it self and where, beyond dissolving spires, lingered grave evening shapes; and he knew a place where, had he felt like walking, he could hear a cuckoo, that symbol of sweet and timeless mischief, that augur of

  the fever renewed again.

  All he wanted anyway was quiet and dull peace arid a few women, preferably-young and good looking and fair tennis players, with whom to indulge in harmless and lazy intrigue. So his mind was made up, and on the homeward boat he framed the words with which he should tell his father that he was going to be an Episcopal minister. But when he reached New York the wire waited him saying that Will Benbow was ill, and all thoughts of his future fled his mind during the journey home and during the two subsequent days that his father lived. Then Will Benbow was buried beside his wife, and Aunt Sally Wyatt was sombrely ubiquitous about the house and talked with steady macabre complacence of Will at meals and snored placidly by night in the guest room. The next day but one Horace opened his father’s law office again.

  His practice, what there was of it, consisted of polite interminable litigation that progressed decorously and pleasantly from conference to conference, the greater part of which were given to discussions of the world’s mutations as exemplified, by men or by printed words; conferences conducted as often as not across pleasant dinner tables or upon golf links or, if the conferee were active enough, upon tennis court—conferences which wended their endless courses without threat of consummation or of advantage or detriment to anyone involved.

  There reposed also in a fire-proof cabinet in his office—the one concession Will Benbow had ever made to progress—number of wills which Horace had inherited and never read, the testators of which accomplished their lives in black silk and lace caps and an atmosphere of formal and timeless desuetude in stately, high-ceiled rooms screened from the ceaseless world by flowering shrubs and old creeping vines; existences circumscribed by church affairs and so-called literary clubs and a conscientious, slightly contemptuous preoccupation with the welfare of remote and obtusely ungrateful heathen peoples. They did not interest themselves in civic affairs. To interfere in the lives or conduct of people whom you saw daily or who served you in various ways or to whose families you occasionally sent food and cast-off clothing was not genteel Besides, the heathen was far enough removed from his willy-nilly elevation to annoy no one save his yet benighted brethren. Clients upon whom he called at rare intervals by formal and unnecessary request and who bade fair to outlive him as they had outlived his father and to be heired in turn by some yet uncorporeal successor to him. As if God, Circumstance, looking down upon the gracious if faintly niggard completeness of their lives, found not the heart to remove them from surroundings tempered so peacefully to their requirements, to any other of lesser decorum and charm.

  The meaning of peace; one of those instants in a man’s life, a neap tide in his affairs, when, as though with a premonition of disaster, the moment takes on a sort of fixed clarity in which his actions and desires stand boldly forth unshadowed and rhythmic one with another like two steeds drawing a angle chariot along a smooth empty road, and during which the I in him stands like a tranquil deciduated tree above the sere and ludicrous disasters of his days.

  3

  Narcissa had failed to call at the office for him and he walked home and changed to flannels and the blue jacket with the Oxford club insignia embroidered upon the breast pocket, and removed his racket from its press. In trees and flower beds spring was accomplishing itself more and more with the accumulating days, and he walked on with the sunlight slanting into his hair, toward Belle’s. He strode on, chanting to himself, walking a little faster until the majestic monstrosity of the house came into view.

  Someone piped thinly to him from beyond the adjoining fence; it was Belle’s eight-year-old daughter, her dress of delicate yellow a single note in a chord of other small colored garments engaged in the intense and sober preoccupations of little girls. Horace waved his racket and went on and turned into Belle’s drive.

  The gravel slipped with short sibilance beneath his rubber soles. He did not approach the house but followed instead along the drive toward the rear, where already against further sunshot green he saw a figure in white tautly antic with motion. They were playing already. Belle would be there, already ensconced in her usual chair: Ahenobarbus’ vestal, proprietorial and inattentive, preeningly dictatorial; removed from the dust and the heat and the blood; disdainful and the principal actor in the piece, O thou grave myrtle shapes amid which petulant Death…

  But Belle was the sort of watcher he preferred, engaged as she would be in that outwardly faultless immersion, in the unflagging theatrics of her own part in the picture, surrounding him as she would with that atmosphere of surreptitious domesticity. Belle didn’t play tennis herself: her legs were not good, and Belle knew it; but sat instead in a tea gown of delicate and irreproachable lines at a table advantageously placed and laden with books and magazines and the temporarily discarded impedimenta of her more Atalanta-esque sisters. There was usually a group around Belle’s chair—other young women or a young man or so inactive between sets, with an occasional older woman come to see just exactly what was going on or what Belle wore at the time; watching Belle’s pretty regal airs with the young men. “Like a moving picture/’ Aunt Sally Wyatt said once, with cold and curious interest.

  And presently Meloney would bring tea out and lay it on the table at Belle’s side. Between the two of them, Belle with her semblance of a peahen suave and preening and petulant upon clipped sward, before marble urns and formal balustrades, and Meloney in her starched cap and apron and her lean shining legs, they made a rite of the most casual gathering; lending a sort of stiffness to it which Mel-oney seemed to bring in on her tray and beneath which the calling ladies grew more and more reserved and coldly watchful and against which Belle flowered like a hothouse bloom, brilliant and petulant and perverse.

  It had taken Belle some time to overcome Jefferson’s prejudice against a formal meal between dinner and supper and to educate the group in which she moved to tea as a function in itself and not as something to give invalids or as an adjunct to a party of some sort. But Horace had assisted her, unwittingly and without self-consciousness; and there had been a youth, son of a carpenter, of whom Belle had made a poet and sent to New Orleans and who, being a conscientious objector, had narrowly escaped prison during the war and who now served in a reportorial capacity on a Texas newspaper, holding the position relinquished by a besotted young man who had enlisted in the Marine Corps early in ‘17.

  But educate them she did. Certain young matrons took to the idea and emulated her, and even her husband himself had learned to take his cup.

  Horace passed on around the house and there came into view the entire court with its two occupants in fluid violent action. Beneath an arcade of white pilasters and vine-hung beams Belle was ensconced like a colorful butterfly, surrounded by the fragile, harmonious impedimenta of the theatric moment Two sat with her; above the group a crepe-myrtle flowered already. The other woman (the third member of the group was a young girl in white and with a grave molasses bang and a tennis racket across her knees) spoke to him, and Belle greeted him with a sort of languid possessive desolation. Her hand was warm, prehensile, like mercury in his palm exploring softly with delicate bones and petulant scented flesh. Belle’s eyes were like hothouse grapes and her mouth was redly mobile, rich with discontent; but waked now from its rouged repose, this was temporarily lost. She had lost Meloney, she told him.

  “Meloney saw thro
ugh your gentility,” Horace said. “You grew careless, probably. Your elegance is much inferior to Meloney’s. You surely didn’t expect to always deceive anyone who can lend as much rigid discomfort to the function of eating and drinking as Meloney could, did you? Or has she got married some more?”

  “She’s gone in business,” Belle answered fretfully. “A beauty shop. And why, I can’t for the life of me see. Those things never do last, here. Can you imagine Jefferson women supporting a beauty shop, with the exception of us three? Mrs. Marders and I might; I’m sure we need it, but what use has Frankie for one?”

  “What seems curious to me,” the other woman said, “is where the money came from. People thought that perhaps you had given it to her, Belle.”

  “Since when have I been a public benefactor?” Belle rejoined coldly. Horace grinned faintly. Mrs. Marders said:

  “Now, Belle, we all know how kindhearted you are; don’t try to conceal it.”

  “I said a public benefactor,” Belle repeated. Horace said quickly:

  “Well, Harry would swap a handmaiden for an ox, any day. At least, he can save a lot of wear and tear on his cellar, not having to counteract your tea in a lot of unrelated masculine tummies. I suppose there’ll be no more tea out here, will there?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Belle said.

  Horace said: “I realize now that it is not tennis that I came here for, but for the incalculable amount of uncomfortable superiority I always get when Meloney serves me tea...I saw your daughter as I came along,” he added

  “She’s somewhere around, I suppose,” Belle agreed indifferently. “You haven’t had your hair cut yet,” she stated. “Why is it that men have no sense about barbers?” she addressed the other two. The older woman watched them brightly, coldly across her two flaccid chins. The young girl sat quietly in her simple virginal white, her racket on her lap and one brown hand lying upon it like a sleeping tan puppy. She was watching Horace with sober interest but without rudeness, as children do. ‘They either won’t go to the barber at all, or they insist on having their