Flags in the Dust (31 page)

Then the specialist entered briskly and went to the switchboard woman, where Dr Alford saw him and rose and went to him. The specialist turned—a brisk, dapper man, who moved with arrogant jerky motions, as though he were exercising with a small sword, and who in turning, almost stepped on Dr Alford. He gave Dr Alford a glassy, impatient stare; then he shook his hand and broke into a high, desiccated burst of words. “On the dot, I see. Promptness. Promptness. That’s good. Patient here? Stood the trip all right, did she?”

“Yes, Doctor, he’s——”

“Good; good. Undressed and all ready, eh?”

“The patient is a m——”

“Just a moment.” The specialist turned. “Oh, Mrs Smith.”

“Yes, Doctor.” The woman at the switchboard did not raise her head, and at that moment another specialist of some kind, a large one, with a majestic, surreptitious air like a royal undertaker, entered and addressed him, and for a while the two of them rumbled and rattled at one another while Dr Alford stood ignored nearby, fuming stiffly and politely, feeling himself sinking lower and lower in Miss Jenny’s opinion of his professional
status. Then the two specialists had done, and Dr Alford led his man toward his patient.

“Got the patient all ready, you say? Good; good; save time. Lunching down town today. Had lunch yourself?”

“No, Doctor. But the patient is a——”

“Daresay not,” the specialist agreed. “Plenty of time, though.” He turned briskly toward a curtained exit, but Dr Alford took his arm firmly but courteously and halted him. Old Bayard was reading the paper. Miss Jenny was watching them frigidly, her bonnet on the exact top of her head.

“Mrs Du Pre; Colonel Sartoris,” Dr Alford said. “This is Dr Brandt. Colonel Sartoris is your p——”

“How d’ye do? How d’ye do? Come along with the patient, eh? Daughter? Grand-daughter?” Old Bayard looked up.

“What?” he said, cupping his ear, and found the specialist staring at his face.

“What’s that on your face?” he demanded, jerking his hand forth and touching the blackened excrescence. When he did so, the thing came off in his fingers, leaving on old Bayard’s withered but unblemished cheek a round spot of skin rosy and fair as any baby’s.

On the train that evening old Bayard, who had sat for a long time in deep thought, spoke suddenly.

“Jenny, what day of the month is this?”

“The ninth,” Miss Jenny answered. “Why?”

Old Bayard sat for a while longer. Then he rose. “Think I’ll go up and smoke a cigar,” he said. “I reckon a little tobacco wont hurt me, will it, Doctor?”

Three weeks later they got a bill from the specialist for fifty dollars. “Now I know why he’s so well known,” Miss Jenny said acidly. Then to her nephew: “You better thank your stars it wasn’t your hat he lifted off.”

Toward Dr Alford her manner is fiercely and belligerently
protective; to old man Falls she gives the briefest and coldest nod and sails on with her nose in air; but to Loosh Peabody she does not speak at all.

She passed from the fresh, hot morning into the cool hall, where Simon uselessly and importantly proprietorial with a duster, bobbed his head to her. “Dey done gone to Memphis today,” he told her. “But Mist’ Bayard waitin’ fer you. Walk right up, missy.”

“Thank you,” she answered, and she went on and mounted the stairs and left him busily wafting dust from one surface to another and then back again. She mounted into a steady drift of air that blew through the open doors at the end of the hall; through these doors she could see a segment of blue hills and salt-colored sky. At Bayard’s door she stopped and stood there for a time, clasping the book to her breast.

The house, despite Simon’s activity in the hall below, was a little portentously quiet, without the reassurance of Miss Jenny’s bustling presence. Faint sounds reached her from far away—out-of-doors sounds whose final drowsy reverberations drifted into the house on the vivid July air; sounds too somnolent and remote to die away.

But from the room before her no sound came at all. Perhaps he was asleep; and the initial impulse—her given word, and the fortitude of her desperate heart which had enabled her to come out despite Miss Jenny’s absence—having served its purpose and deserted her, she stood just without the door, hoping that he was asleep, that he would sleep all day.

But she would have to enter the room in order to find out
if he slept, so she touched her hands to her face, as though by that she would restore to it its wonted serene repose for him to see, and entered.

“Simon?” Bayard said, having felt her presence through that sharpened sixth sense of the sick. He lay on his back, his hands beneath his head, gazing out the window across the room, and she paused again just within the door. At last, roused by her silence, he turned his head and his bleak gaze. “Well, I’m damned. I didn’t believe you’d come out today.”

“Yes,” she answered. “How do you feel?”

“Not after the way you sit with one foot in the hall all the time Aunt Jenny’s out of the room,” he continued. “Did she make you come anyway?”

“She asked me to come out. She doesn’t want you to be alone all day, with just Simon in the house. Do you feel better today?”

“So?” he drawled. “Wont you sit down, then?” She crossed to where her customary chair had been moved into a corner and drew it across the floor. He was watching her as she turned the chair about and seated herself. “What do you think about it?”

“About what?”

“About coming out to keep me company?”

“I’ve brought a new book,” she said. “One H——one I just got. I hope you’ll like this one.”

“I hope so,” he agreed, but without conviction. “Seems like I’d like one after a while, dont it? But what do you think about coming out here today?”

“I dont think a sick person should be left alone with just negroes around,” she said, her face lowered over the book.

“The name of this one is——”

“Why not send a nurse out, then? No use your coming way
out here.” She met his gaze at last, with her grave desperate eyes. “Why do you come, when you dont want to?” he persisted.

“I dont mind,” she answered. She opened the book. “The name of this one is——”

“Dont,” he interrupted. “I’ll have to listen to that damn thing all day. Let’s talk a while.” But her head was bent and her hands were still on the open book. “What makes you afraid to talk to me?”

“Afraid?” she repeated. “Had you rather I’d go?”

“What? No, damn it. I want you to be human for one time and talk to me. Come over here.” She would not look at him, and she raised her hands between them as though he did not lie helpless on his back two yards away. “Come over here closer,” he commanded. She rose, clutching the book.

“I’m going,” she said. “I’ll tell Simon to stay where he can hear you call. Goodbye.”

“Here,” he exclaimed. She went swiftly to the door.

“Goodbye.”

“After what you just said, about leaving me alone with just niggers on the place?” She paused at the door, and he added with cold cunning: “After what Aunt Jenny told you? What’ll I tell her, tonight? Why are you afraid of a man flat on his back, in a damn cast-iron strait-jacket, anyway?” But she only looked at him with her sober, hopeless eyes. “All right, dammit,” he said violently. “Go, then.” And he jerked his head on the pillow and stared again out the window while she returned to her chair. He said, mildly: “What’s the name of this one?” She told him. “Let her go, then. I reckon I’ll be asleep soon, anyway.”

She opened the book and began to read, swiftly, as though she were crouching behind the screen of words her voice raised between them. She read steadily on for some time,
while he on the bed made no movement, her head bent over the book, aware of time passing, as though she were in a contest with time. She finished a sentence and ceased, without raising her head, but almost immediately he spoke. “Go on; I’m still here. Better luck next time.”

The forenoon passed on. Somewhere a clock rang the quarter hours, but saving this there was no other sound in the house. Simon’s activity below stairs had ceased long since, but a murmur of voices reached her at intervals from somewhere, murmurously indistinguishable. The leaves on the branch beyond the window did not stir in the hot air, and upon it a myriad noises blended in a drowsy monotone—the negroes’ voices, sounds of animals in the barnyard, the rhythmic groaning of the water pump; a sudden cacophony of fowls in the garden beneath the window, interspersed with Isom’s meaningless cries as he drove them out.

Bayard was asleep now, and as she realized this she realized also that she did not know just when she had stopped reading. And she sat with the page open upon her knees, a page whose words left no echoes whatever in her mind, looking at his calm face. It was again like a bronze mask, purged by illness of the heat of its violence, yet with the violence still slumbering there and only refined a little.… She looked away and sat with the book open, her hands lying motionless upon the page, gazing out the window. The curtains hung without motion. On the branch athwart the window the leaves hung motionless beneath the intermittent fingers of the sun, and she sat also without life, the fabric of her dress unstirred by her imperceptible breathing, thinking that there would be peace for her only in a world where there were no men at all.

The clock rang twelve times. Immediately after, a stertorous breathing and surreptitious sounds as of a huge rat, and
yet other furtive ratlike sounds in the hall, Simon thrust his head around the door, like the grandfather of all apes. “Is you ’sleep Mist’ Bayard?” he said in a rasping whisper.

“Shhhhhhhh,” Narcissa said, lifting her hand. Simon entered on tiptoe, breathing heavily, scraping his feet on the floor. “Hush,” Narcissa said quickly, “you’ll wake him.”

“Dinner ready,” Simon said, still in that rasping whisper.

“You can keep his warm until he wakes up, cant you?” Narcissa whispered. “Simon!” she whispered. She rose, but he had already crossed to the table, where he fumbled clumsily at the stack of books and contrived at last to topple it to the floor in a random crash. Bayard opened his eyes.

“Good God,” he said, “are you here again?”

“Well, now,” Simon exclaimed with ready dismay, “ef me en Miss Benbow aint waked him up.”

“Why you cant bear to see anybody lying on their back with their eyes closed, I cant see,” Bayard said. “Thank God you were not born in a drove, like mosquitoes.”

“Des lissen at ’im!” Simon said. “Go to sleep quoilin’ en wake up quoilin’. Elnora got dinner ready fer y’all.”

“Why didn’t you bring it up, then?” Bayard said. “Miss Benbow’s too. Unless you’d rather go down?” he added.

In all his movements Simon was a caricature of himself. He now assumed an attitude of shocked reproof. “Dinin’ room de place fer comp’ny,” he said.

“No,” Narcissa said, “I’ll go down. I wont put Simon to that trouble.”

“ ’Taint no trouble,” Simon disclaimed. “Only hit aint no—”

“I’ll come down,” Narcissa said. “You go on and see to Mr Bayard’s tray.”

“Yes’m,” Simon said. He moved toward the door. “You kin
walk right down. Elnora have hit on de table time you git dar.” He went out.

“I try to keep—” Narcissa began.

“I know,” Bayard interrupted. “He wont let anybody sleep through meal time. And you’d better go and have yours, or he’ll carry everything back to the kitchen. And you dont have to hurry back just on my account,” he added.

“Dont have to hurry back?” She paused at the door and looked back at him. “What do you mean?”

“I thought you might be tired of reading.”

“Oh,” she said, and looked away and stood for a moment clothed in her grave despair.

“Look here,” he said suddenly. “Are you sick or anything? Had you rather go home?”

“No,” she answered. She moved again. “I’ll be back soon.”

She had her meal in lonely state in the sombre dining room while Simon, having dispatched Bayard’s tray by Isom, moved about the table and pressed dishes upon her with bland insistence or leaned against the sideboard and conducted a rambling monologue that seemed to have had no beginning and held no prospect of any end. It still flowed easily behind her as she went up the hall; when she stood in the front door it was still going on, volitionless, as though entranced with its own existence and feeding on its own momentum. Beyond the porch the salvia bed lay in an unbearable glare of white light, in clamorous splashes. Beyond it the drive shimmered with heat until, arched over with locust and oak, it descended in a cool green tunnel to the gates and the sultry ribbon of the highroad. Beyond the road fields spread away shimmering, broken here and there by motionless clumps of wood, on to the hills dissolving bluely in the July haze.

She leaned for a while against the door, in her white dress,
her cheek against the cool, smooth plane of the jamb, in a faint draft that came steadily from somewhere, though no leaf stirred. Simon had finished in the dining room and a drowsy murmur of voices came up the hall from the kitchen, borne upon that thin stirring of air too warm to be called a breeze.

At last she heard a movement from above stairs and she remembered Isom with Bayard’s tray, and she turned and slid the parlor doors ajar and entered. The shades were drawn closely, and the crack of light that followed her but deepened the gloom. She found the piano and stood beside it for a while, touching its dusty surface and thinking of Miss Jenny erect and indomitable in her chair beside it. She heard Isom descend the stairs; soon his footsteps died away down the hall, and she drew out the bench and sat down and laid her arms along the closed lid.

Simon entered the dining room again, mumbling to himself and followed presently by Elnora, and they clashed dishes and talked with a mellow rise and fall of consonantless and indistinguishable words. Then they went away, but still she sat with her arms along the cool wood, in the dark quiet room where even time stagnated a little.

The clock rang again, and she moved. I’ve been crying, she thought. “I’ve been crying,” she said in a sad whisper that savored its own loneliness and its sorrow. At the tall mirror beside the parlor door she stood and peered at her dim reflection, touching her eyes with her fingertips. Then she went on, but paused again at the stairs, listening, then she mounted briskly and entered Miss Jenny’s room and went on to her bathroom and bathed her face.