But run the place she did, just as though old Bayard and young Bayard were there. But at night when they sat before tie fire in the office as the year drew on and the night air drifted in heavy again 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 as she would sit, serene again behind her forewarned and forearmed bastions, listening, she admired more than ever that indomitable spirit which, 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 the foundations of her life vanish as in a nightmare not to be healed by either waking or sleep from the soil where her forbears slept trusting in the integrity of mankind, and had had her own roots torn bodily and violently from that soil—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 lance to foes no sword could ever find, that uncomplaining steadfastness of those unsung (ay, unwept, too) women than the fustian and’ useless glamor of the men that theirs was hidden by. 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 shy, then die away.
But she was serene again, and her days centered more and more as the time drew nearer, and Miss Jenny’s voice was only a sound, comforting but without significance. Each week she got a whimsical, gallantly humorous letter from Horace: these she read too with serene detachment—what she could decipher, that is. She had always found Horace’s writing difficult, and parts that she could decipher meant nothing. Brit she knew that he expected that.
Then it was definitely spring again. Miss Jenny’s and Isom’s annual vernal altercation began, continued its violent but harmless course in the garden. They brought the tulip bulbs up from the cellar and set them out, Narcissa helping, and spaded up the other beds and unswaddled the roses and the transplanted jasmine. Narcissa drove into town, saw the first jonquils on the now deserted lawn, blooming as though she and Horace were still there, and later, the narcissi. But when the gladioli bloomed she was not going out any more save in the late afternoon or early evening, when she and Miss Jenny walked in the garden among burgeoning bloom and mockingbirds and belated thrushes where the long avenues of gloaming sunlight reluctant leaned, Miss Jenny still talking about Johnny; confusing the unborn with the dead.
Late in May 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 fie still had not come home, and Miss Jenny wired him again, a night letter, to the former address. 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 a girl and two men. One of the men wore whipcord, with an army pilot’s silver 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 tile other two men crossed 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: “Fm 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 the horns and drums. For. a while Bayard had half listened, staring at the man with his bleak chill eyes, but now he was watching something across the room, letting the man talk on, unminded. 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: “Tin 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 seared?” the aviator repeated in a jeering tone, but he too glanced back at Bayard’s bleak 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 his, and though his arm tightened and his hand slid down her back a little, it was under cover of the shuffling throng into 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 joint two years ago.” They moved on until the band was across the room 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 nearby table:
“—could just get one of these damn yellow-livered pilots to—” his voice was drowned again in a surge of noise, drunken voices and shrill woman-laughter and scraping chairs, but as they approached the table the shabby man still talked with leashed insistent gestures while Bayard stared across the room at whatever it was he watched, raising his glass steadily to his mouth. The girl clutched her partner’s arm.
“You’ve got to help me pass him out,” she begged swiftly. “I’m scared to leave with him, I tell you.”
“Pass Sartoris out? The man don’t wear hair, nor the woman either. Run back to kindergarten, Sister.” Then, struck with her sincerity, he said: “Say, what’s he done, anyway?”
“I don’t know. He’ll do anything. He threw an empty bottle at a traffic cop as we were driving out here. You’ve got—”
“Hush it,” he said. The shabby man ceased and raised his face impatiently. Bayard still gazed across the room.
“Brother-in-law over there,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully. “Don’t speak to family. Mad at us.” They turned and looked.
“Where?” the aviator asked. Then he beckoned a waiter. “Here, Jack.”
“Man with diamond headlight,” Bayard said, “Brave man. Can’t speak to him, though. Might hit me. Friend with him, anyway.”
The aviator looked again. “Looks like his grandmother,” he said. He called the waiter again, then to the girl: “Another cocktail?” He picked up the bottle and filled his glass and reached it over and filled Bayard’s, and turned to the shabby man. “Where’s yours?”
The shabby man waved it impatiently aside. “Look.” He picked up the napkins again. “Dihedral increases in ratio to air speed, up to a certain point. Now, what I want to find out—“
“Tell it to the Marines, buddy,” the aviator interrupted. “I heard a couple of years ago they got a airyplane. Here, waiter!” Bayard was watching the shabby man bleakly.
“You aren’t drinking” the girl said. She touched the aviator beneath the table.
“No,” Bayard agreed. “Why don’t you fly his coffin f
or him, Monaghan?”
“Me?” The aviator set his glass down. “Like hell. My leave comes due next month.” He raised the glass again. “Here’s to wind-up,” he said. “And no heel-taps.”
“Yes,” Bayard agreed, not touching his glass. His face was pale and rigid, a metal mask again.
“I tell you there’s no danger at all, as long as you keep the speed below the point I’ll give you,” the shabby man said. “I’ve tested the wings with weights, and proved the lift and checked all my figures; all you have to do—”
“Won’t you drink with us?” the girl insisted.
“Sure he will,” the aviator said. “Say, you remember that night in Amiens when that big Irish devil, Comyn, wrecked the Cloche-Clos by blowing that A.P.M.’s whistle at the door?” The shabby man sat smoothing the folded napkins on the table before him. Then he burst forth again, his voice hoarse and mad with the intensity of his frustrated dream:
“I’ve worked and slaved, and begged and borrowed, and now when I’ve got the machine and a government inspector, I can’t get a test because you damn yellow-livered pilots won’t take it up. A service full of you, drawing flying pay for sitting in two-story dancehalls, swilling alcohol. You overseas pilots talking about your guts! No wonder you couldn’t keep the Germans from—”
“Shut up,” Bayard told him without heat, in his bleak, careful voice.
“You’re not drinking,” the girl repeated,
“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 was taut at her arm’s length, with the other hand she raised her glass and she smiled at him with brief and terrified coquetry. But he held her wrist in his hard fingers, and while she stared at him widely he drew her steadily toward him. “Turn me loose,” she whispered. “Don’t,” 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. “Don’t,” she whispered again. Her body was wrung in her chair and she put her other 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 cruel cold mask of his face. Then he released her and rose and kicked his chair away.
“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, and he stalked steadily on. The shabby man rose and followed rapidly.
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 in the glow of an electric candle was dewed with rosy perspiration. Beside him sat a woman who turned and looked full at Bayard with an expression of harried desperation; above them stood a waiter with a head like that of a priest, 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 between them, behind the discreet shelter of their backs, and as he and his companion reached the door 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 in to 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 hysterically about and a group of army pilots stood nearby, politely noncommittal The machine looked like any other bi-plane, save that there were no viable cables between the planes, which were braced from within by wires on a system of tension springs; and hence, motionless on the ground, dihedral was negative. The theory was that while in level flight dihedral would be eliminated for the sake of speed, as in the Spad type, and when the machine was banked, side pressure would automatically increase dihedral for maneuverability. The cockpit was set well back toward the fin. “So you can see the wings when they buckle,” the man who loaned him a helmet and goggles said drily. “It’s an old pair,” he added. But Bayard only glanced at him, bleakly humorless. “Look here, Sartoris,” the man added, “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. won’t 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 across the aerodrome toward the hangar. The group followed him and stood quietly about with their bleak, wind-gnawed faces while the engine was being warmed up. But when Bayard got in and settled his goggles, the man approached and thrust his hand into Bayard’s lap. “Here,” he said brusquely. “Take this.” It was a woman’s garter, and Bayard picked it up and returned it.
“I won’t need it,” he said. “Thanks just the same.”
“Well, you know your own business, of course. But if you ever let her get her nose down, you’ll 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 Contact,” he snapped. The mechanic spun the propeller over, and as the machine moved out the shabby man still clung to the cockpit and shouted at him. Soon he was running to keep up and still shouting, until Bayard lifted his hand off the cowling and opened the throttle. But when he reached the end of the field and turned back into the wind the man was running toward him and waving his arms. Bayard
opened the throttle full and the machine lurched for ward and when he passed the shabby man in midfield die tail was high and the plane rushed on in long bounds, and he had a fleeting glimpse of the man’s open mouth and his wild arms as the bounding ceased.
There was not enough tension on the wires, he decided at once, watching them from the V strut out as they tipped and swayed, and he jockeyed the thing carefully on, gaining height. Also he realized that there was a certain point beyond which his own speed would 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 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.
But only the wingtips responded by tipping sharply upward; he flung the stick forward 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: it seemed an eternity before the wingtips recovered, and 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 skid, trying 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.
3
That day Narcissa’s child was born, and the following day Simon drove Miss Jenny in to town and set her down before the telegraph office and held the horses leashed and champing with gallant restiveness by a slight and surreptitious tightening of the reins, while
beneath the tilted tophat and the voluminous duster, he swaggered, sitting down. Though he was sitting and you would not have thought it possible, Simon contrived by some means to actually strut. 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 byer 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 again, sho’. Like in Marse 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. Feabody enter the door and through the plate glass window he saw him approach Miss Jenny as she stood at the counter with her message.