“Yes,” his sister agreed, quietly again, “they’re worried about Colonel Sartoris’ heart, too. Everybody except him and Bayard, that is. I’m glad I have you instead of one of those Sartorises, Horry.” She laid her hand quickly and lightly on his thin knee.
“Dear old Narcy,” he said, then his face clouded again. “Damn scoundrel,” he said. “Well, it’s their trouble. How’s Aunt Sally been?”
“All right.” And then: “I am glad you’re home again.”
The shabby small shops were behind, and now the street opened away between old shady lawns, spacious and quiet. These homes were quite old, in actuality, or appearance at least, and, set well back from the street and its dust, they emanated a gracious and benign peace, steadfast as a windless afternoon in a world without motion or sound. Horace looked about him and drew a long breath.
“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 drove 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 ‘forties, 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 not at all 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 tree, 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, 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 constituted a formal bed on the first terrace. Then Will Benbow, Horace and Narcissa’s father, had had the terraces obliterated. It was done with plows and scrapers and the lawn was 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. Neighbors’ children played quietly beneath the cedars, and a certain few young girls asked and received permission to pick some of the flowers each spring. 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 wisteria vine like heavy tarred rope and thicker than a man’s wrist. The lower casements stood open upon gently billowing curtains of white dimity; upon the sill you expected to see a scrubbed wooden bowl, or at least an immaculate and supercilious cat. But the window all 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 aster 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 life taut and delicate futility. On the old 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 high, 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 are 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 in front of it, cutting the light off, and the walls go glimmering again. At first they’re just shapeless things hunching about. Antic, with shadows on the wet walls, red shadows; a dull red gleam, and black shapes like cardboard cut-outs rising and falling like a magic-lantern shutter. And then a face comes out, blowing, and the 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. Dammit, they bloom like flowers right before your eyes. Midsummer night’s dream to a salamander.” His voice became unintelligible, soaring into phrases which she did not herself recognize, but from the pitch of his voice she knew were Milton’s archangels in their sonorous plunging ruin.
Presently he emerged, 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, he ceased 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 yon?” she asked. This Snopes was a young man, member of a seemingly inexhaustible family which for the last ten or twelve 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 and without making a ripple in the town’s life, behind the counter of a small restaurant on a side street, patronized by country people. With this foothold and like Abraham of old, he led his family piece by piece into town. Flem himself was presently manager of the city light and water plant, and for the following few years he was a sort of handy-man to the city government; and three years ago, to old Bayard Sartoris’ profane surprise and unconcealed disapproval, he became vice-president of the Sartoris bank, where already a relation of his was a bookkeeper.
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, with 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 he had just turned twenty-one in ‘17, and just before the draft law went into effect he applied to a recruiting officer in Memphis and was turned down because of his heart. Later, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, particularly that of Horace Benbow’s friends, he departed with Horace to a position in the YJV1GA. Later still it was told of him that he had travelled all the way to Memphis on that day he offered himself for service, with a plug of chewing tobacco beneath his left armpit But he and his patron had already gone when that story got out
“Did you br
ing your Snopes back with you?” Aunt Sally asked.
“No,” he answered, and his thin, nerve-sick face clouded with a fine cold distaste. “I was very much disappointed in him. I don’t even care to talk about
“Anybody could have told you that when you left,” Aunt Sally said, chewing slowly above her plate. Horace brooded for a moment, his thin hand tightened slowly about his fork.
“Ifs individuals like that, parasites—” he began, but his sister interrupted,
“Who cares about an old Snopes, anyway?” she said. “Besides, it’s too late at night to talk about the horrors of war.” Aunt Sally made a moist sound through her food, 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.” Aunt Sally was no relation at all 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; rights which were never expressed and which she never availed herself of, yet the mutual understanding of which she never permitted to fall into desuetude. She would walk into any of the rooms 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 possessive-ness, and of his wife she spoke nicely, too. “Julia was a right sweet-natured girl,” Aunt Sally 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 one of the three of them. Aunt Sally was a good old soul, but she lived much in the past, shutting her intelligence with a bland finality to anything which had occurred since 1’01. For her, time had gone out drawn by horses, and into her stubborn and placid vacuum the squealing of automobile brakes had never penetrated. Aunt Sally 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 in the house after dark, and as she had never got accustomed to her false teeth and so never touched them other than to change occasionally the water in which they sat, she ate unprettily of unprepossessing but easily malleable foods. Narcissa reached her hand beneath the table and squeezed her brother’s knee.
“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 he let himself slip, as into water, into the constant serenity 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 don’t 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 un-breaking crests pointed on the sky. Light fell outward from the casement, 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; and Horace stood on the dark veranda with his cold pipe, surrounded by that cool, faintly-stringent scent of cedar trees like another presence. The meaning of peace, he said to himself again, releasing the grave words one by one within the cool bell of silence into which he bad 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 home.
“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 added. “Like all women.”
She turned a pale, 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 who read Shakespeare,” 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, arid measured your sex by the stature of a star.”
“Well, they don’t,” she repeated, raising her head.
“No? why don’t 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 happily. “The flowers you know are all there, in their1 shifts and with their hair combed out for the night, but you know all of them. So you don’t 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 her fond serene detachment.
“Did you write to Belle often?” she repeated. “What did you say to her?”
“I wrote what she wanted to read. What all women want in letters. People are really entitled to half of what they think they ought to have, you know.”
“What did you tell her?” Narcissa persisted, turning the pages slowly, without looking up, her passive hand in his, following the stroking movement of his.
“I told her I was unhappy. Perhaps I was,” he added. His sister freed her hand quietly and laid it on the page. He said: “I admire Belle. She’s so cannily stupid. Once I feared her. Perhaps...No, I do’nt. I am immune to destruction: I have a magic. Which is a good sign that I am due for it, say the sages,” he added lightly. “But then, acquired wisdom is a dry-thing; it has a way of crumbling to dust where a sheer and blind coursing of stupid sap is impervious.” He sat without touching her, in a rapt and instantaneous repose. “Not like yours, O Serene,” he said, waking again. Then he fell to saying Dear old Narcy, and again he took her hand. It did not withdraw; neither did it wholly surrender.
&nb
sp; “I don’t think you ought to say I’m dull so often, Horry,” she said soberly.
“Neither do I,” he agreed. “But I must take some sort of revenge on perfection.”
Later she lay in her dark room. Across the corridor Aunt Sally snored with placid regularity; in the adjoining room Horace lay while that wild fantastic futility of his voyaged in lonely regions of its own beyond the moon, about meadows nailed with firmamented stars to the ultimate roof of things, where unicorns filled the neighing air with galloping, or grazed or lay supine in latent and golden-hooved repose.
Horace was seven when she had been born. In the background of her sober babyhood were three beings whose lives and conduct she had adopted with rapt intensity—a lad with a wild thin face and an unflagging aptitude for tribulation; a darkly gallant shape romantic with smuggled edibles and with strong hard hands smelling always of a certain thrilling carbolic soap—a being something like Omnipotence but without awesomeness; and lastly, a gentle figure without legs or any inference of locomotion, like a minor shrine, surrounded always by an aura of gentle melancholy and an endless delicate manipulation of colored silken thread. This last figure was constant with a gentle and melancholy unassertion; the second revolved in an orbit which bore it at regular intervals into outer space, then returned it with its strong and jolly virility into her intense world again; but the first she had made her own by a sober and maternal perseverance. And so by the time she was five or six, people coerced Horace by threatening to tell Narcissa on him.