“you and that damn doctor are going to worry me to death.” Old Bayard’s voice drowned the other temporarily. “Will Falls won’t have a chance to kill me. I can’t sit in my chair in town without that damn squirt sidling around me and looking disappointed because I’m still alive on my feet. And when I come home to get away from him, you can’t even let me eat sapper in peace. Have to show me a lot of damn colored pictures of what some fool thinks a man’s insides look like.”
“Who gwine die, pappy?” Isom whispered.
Simon turned his head. “What you hangin’ eround here fer, boy? Go’n back to dat kitchen whar you belongs.”
“Supper waitin’,” Isom said. “Who dyin’, pappy?”
“Ain’t nobody dyin’. Does anybody soun’ dead? You git on outen de house, now,”
Together they returned down the hall and entered the kitchen. Behind them the voices raged and stormed, blurred a little by walls, but dominant and unequivocal.
“Whut dey fighfin’ erbout, now?” Caspey, chewing, asked.
“Dat’s white folks’ bizness,” Simon told him. “You tend to yo’n, and dey’ll git erlong all right.” He sat down and Elnora rose and filled a cup from the coffee pot on the stove and brought it to him. “White folks got dey troubles same as niggers is. Gimme dat dish o’ meat, boy.”
In the house the storm ran its nightly course, ceased as though by mutual consent, both parties still firmly entrenched; resumed at the supper table the next evening. And so on, day after day, until the second week in July and six days after young Bayard had been fetched home with his chest crushed, Miss Jenny and old Bayard and Dr. Alford went to Memphis to consult a well-known authority on blood and glandular diseases with whom Dr. Alford, with some difficulty, had made a formal engagement. Young Bayard lay upstairs in his cast, but Simon and Elnora would be about the house ill day, and Narcissa Benbow had agreed to come out and keep him company.
Between the two of them they got old Bayard on the early train, still pro testing profanely like a stubborn and bewildered ox. There were others who knew them in the car. These stopped and spoke to them, and remarking Dr. Alford’s juxtaposition, became curious and solicitous. Old Bayard took these opportunities to assert himself again, with violent rumbling, but Miss Jenny hushed him coldly and implacably.
They took him, like a sullen small boy, in a cab to the clinic where the specialist waited them, and in a room resembling an easy and informal hotel lobby they sat among other consultants and an untidy clutter of magazines and papers, waiting for the specialist to arrive. They waited a long time. Meanwhile Dr. Alford from time to time assaulted the impregnable affability of the woman at the telephone switchboard, was repulsed and returned and sat stiffly beside his patient, aware that with every minute they waited, he was losing ground in Miss Jenny’s opinion of him. Old Bayard was cowed too, by this time, though occasionally he rumbled at Miss Jenny with stubborn and hopeless optimism. “Oh, stop swearing at me,” she interrupted him. “You can’t walk out now. Here, here’s the morning paper—take it and be quiet.”
Then the specialist entered briskly and crossed to the switchboard woman, where Dr. Alford saw him and rose and crossed 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 shook Dr. Alford’s hand and broke into a high, desiccated stream of rapid words. “On the dot, I see. Promptness. Promptness. That’s good. Patient here? Asked for a room yet?”
“Yes, Doctor, he’s—”
“Good, good. Undressed her already, 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 sort, a large one, with a profound, surreptitious air like a royal undertaker, entered and stopped Dr. Alford’s, and for a while the two of them alternately 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. Thai 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 with cold and smoldering disapproval
“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?” the specialist said affably. “Come along with the patient, eh? Daughter? Granddaughter?” Old Bayard looked up.
“What?” he said, cupping his ear, and found the specialist staling at his face with abrupt interest.
“What’s that on your face?” he demanded, jerking his hand forth and touching the blackened scabby 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 won’t 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 old Bayard: “You’d 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.
8
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 said, and she went on and mounted the stairs and left Mm busily wafting dust from one surface to another and then back again. The stairs curved onward into the upper hall and 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 dissolving lulls 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 and the cold ubiquity of her scolding. 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 the 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. Thus she found that she could still hope, and found in this fact a thin and derisive amusement.
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, and she
paused again just inside the door. At last; roused by her silence, he turned his head and Jus bleak gaze. “Well, I’ll be 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 out?”
“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. “Won’t you sit down, then?” She crossed to where her customary chair had been moved into a corner and drew it across the floor. He lay with his head cradled in his hands, 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 evasively: “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, doesn’t it? But what do you think about coming out here today?”
“I don’t think a sick person should be left alone with just negroes around. 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 don’t want to?” he persisted.
“I don’t mind,” she answered hopelessly. She freed her gaze with an effort and opened the book. “The name of this one is—”
“Don’t,” he interrupted. “I’ll have to listen to that damn thing all day. Let’s talk a while.” But she presented him now the dark crown of her head, and her hands were motionless upon the book on her knees. “What makes you afraid to talk to me?” he demanded.
“Afraid?” she repeated, with her head bent above the book. “Had you rather I’d go?”
“What? No, dammit. I want you to be human for one time and talk to me. Come over here.” She would not look at him, but she could feel the moody, leashed violence of him like a steady glare of light beneath which she shrank and recoiled, and despite the assurance of his helpless immobility she was swept by sudden and unreasoning fear, and she raised her hands between them though he lay two yards away and helpless on his back. “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 desperate, hopeless eyes; “All right, dammit,” lie said violently. “Go, then.” And he jerked his head savagely 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, her head bent over the book. She finished a sentence and stopped and sat utterly still above the book, 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 sound from the other parts of the house. Simon’s activity below stairs had long ceased, but a murmur of voices reached her at intervals from somewhere, murmurously indistinguishable. The leaves on the tree 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 stock from 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.
He 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, watching his calm face. It was again like a bronze made, purged by illness of the heat of its violence, yet with the violence still slumbering there and only refined a little.
She sat with the book open upon her lap, her hands lying motionless upon the opened page, gazing out the window. The curtains stirred faintly, and in the branches of the tree athwart the window the leaves twinkled lighdy beneath the intermittent fingers of the sun.
The clock rang again: a sound cool as stroked silver in the silent house, and preceded by cautious, stertorious breathing someone crept up the stairs, and after more surreptitious sounds Simon peered his disembodied head, like that of the curious and wizened grandfather of all apes, around the door. “Is you ‘sleep, Mist? Bayard?” he said in a loud, rasping tone.
“Shhhhhhhh,” she cautioned him. “What is it?”
“Ef he ‘sleep, I don’t reckon he wants no dinner now, do he?” Simon rasped.
“Be quiet. You’ll have to keep it until he wakes.”
“Yessum, I ‘speck so,” Simon agreed, lowering his voice a little. He entered on tiptoe, and while Narcissa watched him in mounting exasperation arid alarm, he scuffed across to the table with sounds as of a huge rat.
“What are you going to do?” she whispered. “You’d better go and tell Elnora to keep his dinner for him. I’ll call you when he wakes.”
“Yessum, I ‘speck so,” Simon agreed again. He now busied himself at the table, upon which the books they had read during the past two weeks were stacked one upon another; and as she rose swiftly and quietly he toppled the stack over and lunged clumsily at it and succeeded in knocking it to the floor with a random crash. Bayard opened eyes.
“Good Lord,” he said. “Why can’t you stay out of here?”
“Well, now!” Simon exclaimed in ready dismay. “Ef we ain’t woke ‘im up! Yes, suh, me en Miss Benbow done woke ‘im up. We wuz gwine save yo’ dinner, Mist’ Bayard, but I reckon you mought jes’ well eat it, long ez you ‘wake.”
“I reckon so,” Bayard agreed. “Bring it up, then. But damned if I wouldn’t like to know what objection you have to my sleeping. Thank God you were not born in a drove, like mosquitoes.”
“Des lissen at ‘im! Wake up quoilin’. You’ll feel better when you et some dinner,” he told the patient. Then to Narcissa: “Elnora got a nice dinner fer y’all.”
“Bring Miss Benbow’s up too” Bayard directed. “She can eat here. Unless you’d rather go down?”
In all his movements Simon was a caricature of himself, and he paused in an attitude of shocked reproof. “Dinin’ room mo’ suitable fer comp’ny,” he said.
“Yes, I’ll go down,” she decided promptly. “I won’t put Simon to that trouble.”
“’Tain’t no trouble,” Simon disclaimed. “I jes1 thought you mought like to git out fer a while, whar he can’t quoil at you. I’m gwine put it on de table right away, missy. You can walk right down.”
“Yes, I’ll come right down.” He departed, and she laid the book aside. “1 tried to keep—”
“I know,” Bayard interrupted. “He won’t let anybody sleep through mealtime. And you’d better go and have yours, or he’ll carry everything back to the kitchen. And you don’t have to hurry back just on my account,” he added .
“Don’t 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 tranquility.
“Look here,” he said suddenly, “Are you sick or anything? Had you rather go home?”
“No,” she answered, rousing. “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 an end. It still flowed easily behind her as she went up the hall; as she stood in the door it was still going on, volitionless, as though entranced with its own existence and feeding on its own momentum. 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 stretched away shimmering, broken here and there by motionless clumps of trees, on to the hills dissolving bluely behind 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 a thin stirring of air too warm to be called a breeze and upon which not even the cries of birds came.
At last she heard a movement from above stairs and she remembered Isom with Bayard’s tray, and she turned and did the parlor door 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 the gloom beside it. She heard Isom descend the stairs; soon his footsteps died away down the hall, and the 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 again 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.