Flags in the Dust (21 page)

“Perhaps this is the reason for wars,” he said. “The meaning of peace.”

The meaning of peace. They turned into an intersecting street narrower but more shady and even quieter, with a golden Arcadian drowse, and turned through a gate in a honeysuckle-covered fence of iron pickets. From the gate the cinder-packed drive rose in a grave curve between cedars. The cedars had been set out by an English architect of the ’40s, who had built the house (with the minor concession of a veranda) in the funereal light tudor which the young Victoria had sanctioned; and beneath and among them, even on the brightest days, lay a resinous exhilarating gloom. Mockingbirds loved them, and catbirds, and thrushes demurely mellifluous in the late afternoon; but the grass beneath them was sparse or nonexistent and there were no insects save fireflies in the dusk.

The drive ascended to the house and curved before it and descended again to the street in an unbroken arc of cedars. Within the arc rose a lone oak, broad and huge and low; around its trunk ran a wooden bench. About this halfmoon of
lawn and without the arc of the drive, were bridal wreath and crepe-myrtle bushes old as time, and huge as age, would make them. Big as trees they were, and in one fence corner was an astonishing clump of stunted banana palms and in the other a lantana with its clotted wounds, which Francis Benbow had brought home from Barbados in a tophat-box in ’71.

About the oak and from the funereal scimitar of the drive descending, lawn flowed streetward with good sward broken by random clumps of jonquil and narcissus and gladiolus. Originally the lawn was in terraces and the flowers a formal bed on the first terrace. Then Will Benbow, Horace’s and Narcissa’s father, had had the terraces obliterated. It was done with plows and scrapers and seeded anew with grass, and he had supposed the flower bed destroyed. But the next spring the scattered bulbs sprouted again, and now every year the lawn was stippled with bloom in yellow, white and pink without order. A certain few young girls asked and received permission to pick some of them each spring, and neighbors’ children played quietly among them and beneath the cedars. At the top of the drive, where it curved away descending again, sat the brick doll’s house in which Horace and Narcissa lived, surrounded always by that cool, faintly-stringent odor of cedar trees.

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 upon gently billowing curtains; upon 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 of patchwork in crimson and white; and in the doorway Aunt Sally, a potty little woman in a lace cap, leaned upon 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. The meaning of peace.

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 upon a chair, holding yet through long association, in its harsh drab folds something of that taut and delicate futility of his. On the marble-topped dresser lay the crucible and tubes of 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 the light off, 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. Sound 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 recognise, but which from the pitch of his voice she knew were 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 manager of the city light and water plant, and for the following few years he was a sort of handyman to the municipal government; and three years ago, to old Bayard’s profane astonishment and unconcealed annoyance, he became vice-president of the Sartoris bank, where already a relation of his was a book-keeper.

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, barber shops (there was one, an invalid of some sort, who operated a second-hand
peanut parcher)—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 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 travelled 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 dont 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 about 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 which she never availed herself of, yet the mutual admission of whose existence she never permitted to fall into desuetude. She would walk into any room in the house unannounced, and she liked to talk tediously and a little tactlessly 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 faintly disparaging possessiveness, and of his wife 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 unprettily of unprepossessing but easily malleable foods. 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 dont 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 upon 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 on 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 were 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 dont,” she repeated, raising her face.

“No? why dont 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 the fine devastation of his 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 dont bother ’em, you just walk on and sort of stop and turn over a leaf occasionally, a leaf you didn’t notice 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.