“Have it your own way,” Miss Jenny said tartly; “I can draw my own conclusions. I imagine Belle and Horace can produce quite a mess together. And I’m glad of it. That man is making an old maid out of you. It isn’t too late now, but if he’d waited five years later to play the fool, there wouldn’t have been anything left for you except to give music lessons. But you can get married, now.”
“Would you advise me to marry?” Narcissa asked.
“I wouldn’t advise anybody to marry. You won’t be happy, but then, women haven’t got civilized enough yet to be happy unmarried, so you might as well try it. We can stand anything, anyhow. And change is good for folks. They say it is, at least.”
But Narcissa didn’t believe that. “I shall never marry,” she told. herself. Men . . . that was where unhappiness lay, getting men into your life. “And if I couldn’t keep Horace, loving him as I did . . .” Bayard slept. She picked up the book and read on to herself, about antic people in an antic world where things happened as they should happen. The shadows lengthened eastward. She read on, lost from mutable things.
After a while Bayard waked, and she fetched him a cigarette and a match. “You won’t have to do this any more,” he said. “I reckon you’re sorry.”
His cast would come off tomorrow, he meant, and he lay smoking his cigarette and talking of what he would do when he was about again. He would see about getting his car repaired first thing; have to take it in to Memphis, probably. And he planned a trip for the three of them—Miss Jenny, Narcissa and himself—while the car was in the shop. “It’ll take about a week,” he added. “She must be in pretty bad shape. Hope I didn’t hurt her guts any.”
“But you aren’t going to drive it fast any more,” she reminded him. He lay still, his cigarette burning in his fingers. “You promised,” she insisted.
“When did I promise?”
“Don’t you remember? That . . . afternoon, when they were . . .”
“When I scared you?” She sat watching him with her grave, troubled eyes. “Come here,” he said. She rose and went to the bed and he took her hand.
“You won’t drive it fast again?” she persisted.
“No,” he answered, “I promise.” And they were still so, her hand in his. The curtains stirred in the breeze, and the leaves on the branch beyond the window twinkled and turned and lisped against one another. Sunset was not far away. The breeze would cease then. He moved.
“Narcissa,” he said. She looked at him. “Lean your face down here.”
She looked away, and for a while there was no movement, no sound between them.
“I must go,” she said at last, quietly, and he released her hand.
His cast was gone, and he was up and about again, moving a little gingerly, to be sure, but already Miss Jenny was beginning to contemplate him a little anxiously. “If we could just arrange to have one of his minor bones broken every month or so, just enough to keep him in the house . . .”
“That won’t be necessary,” Narcissa told her. “He’s going to behave from now on.”
“How do you know?” Miss Jenny demanded. “What in the world makes you think that?”
“He promised he would.”
“He’ll promise anything when he’s flat on his back,” Miss Jenny retorted. “They all will; always have. But what makes you think he’ll keep it?”
“He promised me he would,” Narcissa replied serenely.
His first act was to see about his car. It had been pulled into town and patched up after a fashion until it would run under its own power, but it would be necessary to take it to Memphis to have the frame straightened and the body repaired. Bayard was all for doing this himself, fresh-knit ribs and all, but Miss Jenny put her foot down, and after a furious half hour he was vanquished. And so the car was driven in to Memphis by a youth who hung around one of the garages in town. “Narcissa’ll take you driving in her car, if you must ride,” Miss Jenny told him.
“In that little peanut-parcher?” Bayard said derisively. “It won’t do better than twenty-one miles.”
“No, thank God,” Miss Jenny answered. “And I’ve written to Memphis and asked ’em to fix yours so it’ll run just like that, too.”
Bayard stared at her with humorless bleakness. “Did you do any such damn thing as that?”
“Oh, take him away, Narcissa,” Miss Jenny exclaimed. “Get him out of my sight. I’m so tired looking at you.”
But he wouldn’t ride in Narcissa’s car at first. He missed no opportunity to speak of it with heavy, facetious disparagement, but he wouldn’t ride in it. Dr. Alford had evolved a tight elastic bandage for his chest so that he could ride his horse, but he had developed an astonishing propensity for lounging about the house when Narcissa was there. And Narcissa came quite often. Miss Jenny thought it was on Bayard’s account and pinned the guest down in her forthright way; whereupon Narcissa told her about Horace and Belle while Miss Jenny sat indomitably erect on her straight chair beside the piano.
“Poor child,” she said, and: “Lord, ain’t they fools?” And then: “Well, you’re right; I wouldn’t marry one of ’em either.”
“I’m not,” Narcissa answered. “I wish there weren’t any of them in the world.”
Miss Jenny said “Hmph.”
And then one afternoon they were in Narcissa’s car and Bayard was driving, over her protest at first. But he was behaving himself quite sensibly, and at last she relaxed. They drove down the valley road and turned into the hills and she asked where they were going, but his answer was vague. So she sat quietly beside him and the road mounted presently in long curves among dark pines in the slanting afternoon. The road wound on, with changing sun-shot vistas of the valley and the opposite hills at every turn, and always the somber pines and their faint, exhilarating odor. After a time they topped a hill and Bayard slowed the car. Beneath them the road sank, then flattened away toward a line of willows. crossed a stone bridge, and rose again, curving redly from sight among the dark trees.
“There’s the place,” he said.
“The place?” she repeated dreamily; then as the car rolled forward again, gaining speed, she roused herself and understood what he meant. “You promised!” she cried, but he jerked the throttle down the ratchet, and she clutched him and tried to scream. But she could make no sound, nor could she close her eyes as the narrow bridge hurtled dancing toward them. And then her breath stopped and her heart as they flashed, with a sharp reverberation like hail on a tin roof, between willows and a crashing glint of water and shot on up the next hill. The small car swayed on the curve, lost its footing and went into the ditch, bounded out and hurled across the road. Then Bayard straightened it out and with diminishing speed it rocked on up the hill, and stopped. She sat beside him, her bloodless mouth open, beseeching him with her wide, hopeless eyes. Then she caught her breath, wailing.
“I didn’t mean—” he began awkwardly. “I just wanted to see if I could do it,” and he put his arms around her and she clung to him, moving her hands crazily about his shoulders. “I didn’t mean—” he essayed again, and then her crazed hands were on his face and she was sobbing wildly against his mouth.
9
All the forenoon he bent over his ledgers, watching his hand pen the neat figures into the ruled columns with a sort of astonishment. After his sleepless night he labored in a kind of stupor, his mind too spent even to contemplate the coiling images of his lust, thwarted now for all time, save with a dull astonishment that the images no longer filled his blood with fury and despair, so that it was some time before his dulled nerves reacted to a fresh threat and caused him to raise his head. Virgil Beard was just entering the door.
He slid hurriedly from his stool and slipped around the corner and darted through the door of old Bayard’s office. He crouched within the door, heard the boy ask politely for him, heard the cashier s
ay that he was there a minute ago but that he reckoned he had stepped out; heard the boy say, well, he reckoned he’d wait for him. And he crouched within the door, wiping his drooling mouth with his handkerchief.
After a while he opened the door cautiously. The boy squatted patiently and blandly on his heels against the wall, and Snopes stood again with his clenched and trembling hands. He did not curse: his desperate fury was beyond words, but his breath came and went with a swift ah-ah-ah sound in his throat and it seemed to him that his eyeballs were being drawn back into his skull, turning further and further until the cords that drew them reached the snapping point. He opened the door.
“Hi, Mr. Snopes,” the boy said genially, rising. Snopes strode on and entered the grille and approached the cashier.
“Res,” he said in a voice scarcely articulate, “gimme five dollars.”
“What?’”
“Gimme five dollars,” he repeated hoarsely. The cashier did so, and scribbled a notation and speared it on the file beside him. The boy had come up to the window, but Snopes went on and he followed the man back to the office, his bare feet hissing on the linoleum floor.
“I tried to find you last night,” he explained. “But you wasn’t to home.” Then he looked up and saw Snopes’ face, and after a moment he screamed and broke his trance and turned to flee. But the man caught him by his overalls, and he writhed and twisted, screaming with utter terror as the man dragged him across the office and opened the door that gave upon the vacant lot. Snopes was trying to say something in his mad, shaking voice, but the boy screamed steadily, hanging limp from the other’s hand as he tried to thrust the bill into his pocket. At last he succeeded and released the boy, who staggered away, found his legs and fled.
“What were you whuppin’ that boy, for?” the cashier asked curiously, when Snopes returned to his desk.
“For not minding his own business,” he snapped, opening his ledger again.
As he crossed the now empty square he looked up at the lighted face of the clock. It was ten minutes past eleven. There was no sign of life save the lonely figure of the night marshal in the door of the lighted postoffice lobby.
He left the square and entered a street and went steadily beneath the arc lights, having the street to himself and the regular recapitulation of his striding shadow dogging him out of the darkness, through the pool of the light and into darkness again. He turned a corner and followed a yet quieter street and turned presently from it into a lane between massed banks of honeysuckle higher than his head and sweet on the night air. The lane was dark and he increased his pace. On either hand the upper stories of houses rose above the honeysuckle, with now and then a lighted window among the dark trees. He kept close to the wall and went swiftly on, passing now between back premises. After a while another house loomed, and a serried row of cedars against the paler sky, and he stole beside a stone wall and so came opposite the garage. He stopped here and sought in the lush grass beneath the wall and stooped and picked up a pole, which he leaned against the wall. With the aid of the pole he mounted on to the wall and thence to the garage roof.
The house was dark, and presently he slid to the ground and stole across the lawn and stopped beneath a window. There was a light somewhere toward the front, but no sound, no movement; and he stood for a time listening, darting his eyes this way and that, covert and ceaseless as a cornered animal.
The screen responded easily to his knife, and he raised it and listened again. Then with a single scrambling motion he was in the room, crouching. Still no sound save the thudding of his heart, and the whole house gave off that unmistakable emanation of temporary desertion. He drew out his handkerchief and wiped his mouth.
The light was in the next room, and he went on. The stairs rose from the end of this room and he scuttled silently across it and mounted swiftly into the upper darkness and groped forward until he touched a wall, then a door. The knob turned in his fingers.
It was the right room; he knew that at once. Her presence was all about him, and for a time his heart thudded and thudded in his throat and fury and lust and despair shook him. He pulled himself together; he must get out quickly, and he groped his way across to the bed and lay face down on it, his head buried in the pillows, writhing and making smothered, animal-like meanings. But he must get out, and he got up and groped across the room again. What little light there was was behind him now, and instead of finding the door, he blundered into a chest of drawers, and stood there a moment, learning its shape with his hands. Then he opened one of the drawers and fumbled in it. It was filled with a faintly-scented fragility of garments, but he could not distinguish one from another with his hands.
He found a match in his pocket and struck it beneath the shelter of his palm, and by its light he chose one of the soft garments, discovering as the match died a packet of letters in the corner of the drawer. He recognized them at once, dropped the dead match to the floor and took the packet from the drawer and put it in his pocket, and placed the letter he had just written in the drawer, and he stood for a time with the garment crushed against his face; remained so for some time before a sound caused him to jerk his head up, listening. A car was entering the drive, and as he sprang to the window its lights swept beneath him and fell full upon the open garage, and he crouched at the window in a panic. Then he sped to the door and stopped again, crouching, panting and snarling with indecision.
He ran back to the window. The garage was dark, and two dark figures were approaching the house, and he crouched beside the window until they had passed from sight. Then, still clutching the garment, he climbed out the window and swung from the sill a moment by his hands, and closed his eyes and dropped.
A crash of glass, and he sprawled numbed by shock amid lesser crashes and a burst of stale, dry dust. He had fallen into a shallow flower-pit and he scrambled out and tried to stand and fell again, while nausea swirled in him. It was his knee, and he lay sick and withdrawn, gasping lips while his trouser leg sopped slowly and warmly, clutching the garment and staring at the dark sky with wide, mad eyes. He heard voices in the house, and a light came on behind the window above him and he turned crawling, and at a scrambling hobble he crossed the lawn and plunged into the shadow of the cedars beside the garage, where he lay watching the window in which a man leaned, peering out; and he moaned a little while his blood ran between his clasped fingers. He drove himself onward again and dragged his bleeding leg up on to the wall, and dropped into the lane and cast the pole down. A hundred yards further he stopped and drew his torn trousers aside and tried to bandage the gash in his leg. But the handkerchief stained over almost at once and still blood ran and ran down his leg and into his shoe.
Once in the back room of the bank he rolled his trouser leg up and removed the handkerchief and bathed the gash at the lavatory. It still bled, and the sight of his own blood sickened him, and he swayed against the wall, watching his blood. Then he removed his shirt and bound it as tightly as he could about his leg. He still felt nausea, and he drank long of the tepid water from the tap. Immediately it welled salinely within him and he clung to the lavatory, sweating, trying not to vomit, until the spell passed. His leg felt numb and dead, and he was weak and he wished to lie down, but he dared not.
He entered the grille, his left heel showing a red print at each step. The vault door opened soundlessly; without a light he found the key to the cash box and opened it. He took only bank notes, but he took all he could find. Then he closed the vault and locked it, returned to the lavatory and wetted a towel and removed his heel prints from the linoleum floor. Then he passed out the back door, threw the latch so it would lock behind him. The clock on the courthouse rang midnight.
In an alley between two negro stores a negro man sat in a battered Ford, waiting. He gave the negro a bill and the negro cranked the engine and came and stared curiously at the bloody cloth beneath his torn trousers. “Whut happened, boss? Y’
ain’t hurt, is you?”
“Run into some wire,” he answered shortly: “She’s got plenty gas, ’ain’t she?” The negro said yes, and he drove on. As he crossed the square the marshal, Buck, stood beneath the light before the post office, and Snopes cursed him with silent and bitter derision. He drove on and entered another street and passed from view, and presently the sound of his going had died away.
Part Four
It was a sunny Sunday afternoon in October. Narcissa and Bayard had driven off soon after dinner and Miss Jenny and old Bayard were sitting on the sunny end of the veranda when, preceded by Simon, the deputation came solemnly around the corner of the house from the rear. It consisted of six negroes in a catholic variety of Sunday raiment and it was headed by a huge, bull-necked negro in a hind-side-before collar and a Prince Albert coat, with an orotund air and a wild, compelling eye.
“Yere dey is, Cunnel.” Simon said, and without pausing he mounted the steps and turned about, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind as to which side he considered himself aligned with. The deputation halted and milled a little, solemnly decorous.
“What’s this?” Miss Jenny asked. “That you, Uncle Bird?”
“Yessum, Miss Jenny.” One of the committee uncovered his grizzled wool and bowed. “How you gittin’ on?” The others shuffled their feet, and one by one they removed their hats. The leader clasped his across his chest like a Congressman being photographed.
“Here, Simon,” old Bayard demanded, “what’s this? What did you bring these niggers around here for?”
“Dey come fer dey money,” Simon explained.
“What?”
“Money?” Miss Jenny repeated with interest. “What money, Simon?”
“Dey come fer dat money you promised ’um,” Simon shouted.
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