The car went on, on the dry hissing of the closed muffler. The negroes murmured among themselves with mellow snatches of laughter whipped like scraps of torn paper away behind. They passed the iron gates and Bayard’s home serenely in the moonlight among its trees, and the silent, box-like flag station and the metal-roofed cotton gin on the railroad siding.
The road rose at last into hills. It was smooth and empty and winding, and the negroes fell silent as Bayard increased speed. But still it was not anything like what they had anticipated of him. Twice more they stopped and drank, and then from an ultimate hilltop they looked down upon another cluster of lights like a clotting of beads upon the pale gash where the railroad ran. Hub produced the breather-cap and they drank again.
Through streets identical with those at home they moved slowly, toward an identical square. People on the square turned and looked curiously after them. They crossed the square and followed another street and went on between broad lawns and shaded windows, and presently beyond an iron fence and well back among black-and-silver trees, lighted windows hung in ordered tiers like rectangular lanterns strung among the branches.
They stopped here, in shadow. The negroes descended and lifted the bass viol out, and a guitar. The third one held a slender tube frosted over with keys upon which the intermittent moon glinted in pale points, and they stood with their heads together, murmuring among themselves and touching plaintive muted chords from the strings. Then the one with the clarinet raised it to his lips.
The tunes were old tunes. Some of them were sophisticated tunes and formally intricate, but in the rendition this was lost, and all of them were imbued instead with a plaintive similarity, a slurred and rhythmic simplicity; and they drifted in rich, plaintive chords upon the silver air, fading, dying in minor reiterations along the treacherous vistas of the moon. They played again, an old waltz. The college Cerberus came across the dappled lawn to the fence and leaned his arms upon it, a lumped listening shadow among other shadows. Across the street, in the shadows there, other listeners stood. A car approached and slowed to the curb and shut off engine and lights, and in the tiered windows heads leaned, aureoled against the lighted rooms behind, without individuality, feminine, distant, delicately and divinely young.
They played “Home, Sweet Home,” and when the rich minor died away, across to them came a soft clapping of slender palms. Then Mitch sang “Good Night, Ladies” in his true, over-sweet tenor, and the young hands were more importunate, and as they drove away the slender heads leaned aureoled with bright hair in the lighted windows and the soft clapping drifted after them for a long while, fainter and fainter in the silver silence and the moon’s infinitude.
At the top of the first hill out of town they stopped and Hub removed the breather-cap. Behind them random lights shone among the trees, and it was as though there still came to them across the hushed world that sound of young palms like flung delicate flowers before their masculinity and their youth, and they drank without speaking, lapped still in the fading magic of that lost moment. Mitch sang to himself softly; the car slid purring on again. The road dropped curving smoothly, empty and blanched. Bayard spoke, his voice harsh, abrupt.
“Cut-out, Hub,” he said. Hub bent forward and reached his hand under the dash, and the car swept on with a steady, leashed muttering like waking thunderous wings; then the road flattened in a long swoop toward another rise and the muttering leaped to crescendo and the car shot forward with neck-snapping violence. The negroes had stopped talking; one of them raised a wailing shout.
“Reno lost his hat,” Hub said, looking back.
“He don’t need it,” Bayard replied. The car roared up this hill and rushed across the crest of it and flashed around a tight curve.
“Oh, Lawd,” the negro wailed. “Mr. Bayard!” The air-blast stripped his words away like leaves. “Lemme out, Mr. Bayard!”
“Jump out, then,” Bayard answered. The road fell from beneath them like a tilting floor, and away across a valley, straight now as a string. The negroes clutched their instruments and held to one another. The speedometer showed fifty-five and sixty and turned gradually on. Sparse houses flashed slumbering away, and fields and patches of woodland like tunnels.
The road went on across the black and silver land. Whippoorwills called on either side, one to another inquiring, liquid reiterations; now and then as the headlights swept in the road’s abrupt windings, two spots of pale fire blinked in the dust before them as the bird blundered awkwardly somewhere beneath the radiator. The ridge rose steadily, with wooded slopes falling away on either hand. Sparse negro cabins squatted on the slopes or beside the road.
The road dipped, then rose again in a long slant broken by another dip; then it stood directly before them like a wall. The car shot upward and over the dip and left the road completely, then swooped dreadfully on, and the negroes’ concerted wail whipped forlornly away. Then the ridge attained its crest and the car’s thunder ceased and it rolled to a stop. The negroes now sat in the bottom of the tonneau.
“Is dis heaven?” one murmured after a time.
“Dey wouldn’t let you in heaven, wid likker on yo’ breaf and no hat, feller,” another said.
“Ef de Lawd don’t take no better keer of me dan He done of dat hat, I don’t wanter go dar, noways,” the first rejoined.
“Mmmmmmm,” the second agreed, “when us come down dat ’ere las’ hill, dis yere cla’inet almos’ blowed clean outen my han’, let ’lone my hat.”
“And when us jumped over dat ’ere lawg er whutever it wuz back dar,” the third one added, “I thought fer a minute dis whole auto’bile done blowed outen my han’.”
They drank again. It was high here, and the air moved with grave coolness. On either hand lay a valley filled with silver mist and with whippoorwills; beyond these valleys the silver earth rolled on into the sky. Across it, mournful and far, a dog howled. Bayard’s head was as cool and clear as a clapperless bell. Within it that face emerged clearly at last: those two eyes round with grave astonishment, winged serenely by two dark wings of hair. It was that Benbow girl, he said to himself, and he sat for a while, gazing into the sky. The lights on the town clock were steadfast and yellow and unwinking in the dissolving distance, but in all other directions the world rolled away m slumbrous ridges, milkily opaline.
Her appetite was gone at supper, and Aunt Sally Wyatt mouthed her soft prepared food and mumbled querulously at her because she wouldn’t eat.
“My mother saw to it that I drank a good cup of bark tea when I come sulking to the table and wouldn’t eat,” Aunt Sally stated, “but folks nowadays think the good Lord’s going to keep ’em well and them lifting no finger.”
“I’m all right,” Narcissa insisted. “I just don’t want any supper.”
“That’s what you say. Let yourself get down, and Lord knows, I ain’t strong enough to wait on you. In my day young folks had more consideration for their elders.” She mouthed her food unprettily, querulously and monotonously retrospective, while Narcissa toyed restively with the food she could not eat. Later Aunt Sally continued her monologue while she rocked with her interminable fancywork on her lap. She would never divulge what it was to be when completed, nor for whom, and she had been working on it for fifteen years, carrying about with her a shapeless bag of dingy, threadbare brocade containing odds and ends of colored fabric in all possible shapes. She could never bring herself to trim them to any pattern; so she shifted and fitted and mused and fitted and shifted them like pieces of a patient puzzle-picture, trying to fit them to a pattern or create a pattern about them without using her scissors; smoothing her colored scraps with flaccid, putty-colored fingers, shifting and shifting them. From the bosom of her dress the needle Narcissa had threaded for her dangled its spidery skein.
Across the room Narcissa sat with a book. Aunt Sally’s voice droned on with querulous interminability while Narcissa read. Suddenly she ros
e and laid the book down and crossed the room and entered the alcove where her piano sat. But she had not played four bars before her hands crashed in discord, and she shut the piano and went to the telephone.
Miss Jenny thanked her tartly for her solicitude, and dared to say that Bayard was all right: still an active member of the so-called human race, that is, since they had received no official word from the coroner. No, she had heard nothing of him since Loosh Peabody ’phoned her at four o’clock that Bayard was on his way home with a broken head. The broken head she readily believed, but the other part of the message she had put no credence in whatever, having lived with those damn Sartorises eighty years and knowing that home would be the last place in the world a Sartoris with a broken head would ever consider going. No, she was not even interested in his present whereabouts, and she hoped he hadn’t injured the horse. Horses were valuable animals.
Narcissa returned to the living room and explained to Aunt Sally whom she had been talking to and why, and drew a low chair to the lamp and took up her book.
“Well,” Aunt Sally said after a time, “if you ain’t going to talk any . . .” She fumbled her scraps together and crammed them into the bag. “I thank the Lord sometimes you and Horace ain’t any blood of mine, the way you all go on. But if you’d drink it, I don’t know who’s to get sassafras for you: I ain’t able to, and you wouldn’t know it from dog fennel or mullein, yourself.”
“I’m all right,” Narcissa protested.
“Go ahead,” Aunt Sally repeated, “get flat on your back, with me and that trifling nigger to take care of you. She ain’t wiped off a picture frame in six months, to my certain knowledge. And I’ve done everything but beg and pray.” She rose and said good night and hobbled from the room. Narcissa sat and turned the pages on, hearing the other mount the stairs with measured, laborious tappings of her stick, and for a while longer she sat and turned the pages of her book.
She turned on her light and undressed and took her book to bed, where she again held her consciousness submerged deliberately, as you hold a puppy under water until its struggles cease. And after a time her mind surrendered to the book and she read on, pausing from time to time to think warmly of sleep, reading again. And so when the negroes first blended their instruments beneath the window she paid them only the most perfunctory notice. “Why in the world are those jelly-beans serenading me?” she thought with faint amusement, visioning immediately Aunt Sally in her nightcap leaning from a window and shouting them away. And she lay with the book open, seeing upon the spread page the picture she had created while the plaintive rhythm of the strings and clarinet drifted into the open window.
Then she sat bolt upright, with a sharp and utter certainty, and clapped the book shut and slipped from bed. From the adjoining room she looked down.
The negroes were grouped on the lawn; the frosted clarinet, the guitar, the sober, comical bulk of the bass fiddle. At the street entrance to the drive a motorcar stood in shadow. The musicians played once; then a voice called from the car, and they retreated across the lawn and the car moved away, without lights. She was certain, then: no one else would play one tune beneath a lady’s window, just enough to waken her from sleep, then go away.
She returned to her room. The book lay face down upon the bed, but she went to the window and stood there, between the parted curtains, looking out upon the black-and-silver world and the peaceful night. The air moved upon her face and amid the dark, fallen wings of her hair with grave coolness. “The beast, the beast,” she whispered to herself. She let the curtains fall and on her silent feet she descended the stairs again and found the telephone in the darkness, muffling its bell when she rang.
Miss Jenny’s voice came out of the night with its usual brisk and cold asperity, and without surprise or curiosity. No, he had not returned home, for he was by now safely locked up in jail, she believed, unless the city officers were too corrupt to obey a lady’s request. Serenading? Fiddle sticks. What would he want to go serenading for? He couldn’t injure himself serenading, unless someone killed him with a flatiron or an alarm clock. And why was she concerned about him?
Narcissa hung up, and for a moment she stood in the darkness, beating her fists on the telephone’s unresponsive box. The beast, the beast.
She received three callers that night. One came formally; the second came informally; the third came anonymously.
The garage which sheltered her car was a small brick building surrounded by evergreens. One side of it was a continuat’ion of the garden wall. Beyond the wall a grass-grown lane led back to another street. The garage was about fifteen yards from the house and its roof rose to the level of the first-floor windows. Narcissa’s bedroom windows looked out upon the slate roof of it.
This third caller entered by the lane and mounted on to the wall and thence to the garage roof, where he now lay in the shadow of a cedar, sheltered so from the moon. He had lain there for a long time. The room facing him was dark when he arrived, but he had lain in his fastness quiet as an animal and with an animal’s patience, without movement save to occasionally raise his head and reconnoiter the immediate scene with covert dartings of his eyes.
But the room facing him remained dark while an hour passed. In the meantime a car entered the drive (he recognized it; he knew every car in town) and a man entered the house. The second hour passed and the room was still dark, and the car stood yet in the drive. Then the man emerged and drove away, and a moment later the lights downstairs went out, and then the window facing him glowed, and through the sheer curtains he saw her moving about the room, watched the shadowy motions of her disrobing. Then she passed out of his vision. But the light still burned and he lay with still and infinite patience; lay so while another hour passed and another car stopped before the house and three men carrying an awkwardly-shaped burden came up the drive and stood in the moonlight beneath the window; lay so until they played once and went away. When they had gone, she came to the window and parted the curtains and stood for a while in the dark fallen wings of her hair, looking directly into his hidden eyes.
Then the curtains fell again, and once more she was a shadowy movement beyond them. Then the light went off, and he lay face downward upon the steep pitch of the roof, utterly motionless for a long time, darting from beneath his hidden face covert, ceaseless glances, quick and darting, all-embracing as those of an animal.
To Narcissa’s home they came finally. They had visited the dark homes of all the other unmarried girls one by one and sat in the car while the negroes stood on the lawn with their blended instruments. Heads had appeared at darkened windows, sometimes lights went up; once they were invited in, but Hub and Mitch hung diffidently back; once refreshment was sent out to them; once they were heartily cursed by a young man who happened to be sitting with the young lady on the dark veranda. In the meantime they had lost the breather-cap, and as they moved from house to house, all six of them drank fraternally from the jug, turn and turn about. At last they reached the Benbow’s and played once beneath the cedars. There was a light yet in one window, but none came to it.
The moon stood well down the sky. Its light was now a cold silver on things, spent and a little wearied, and the world was empty as they rolled without lights along a street lifeless and fixed in black and silver as any street in the moon itself. Beneath stippled intermittent shadows they went, passed quiet intersections dissolving away, occasionally a car motionless at the curb before a house. A dog crossed the street ahead of them trotting, and went on across a lawn and so from sight, but saving this there was no movement anywhere.
The square opened spaciously about the absinthe-cloudy mass of elms that surrounded the courthouse. Among them the round spaced globes were more like huge, pallid grapes than ever. Above the exposed vault in each bank burned a single bulb; inside the hotel lobby, before which a row of cars was aligned, another burned. Other lights there were none.
They circled the
courthouse, and a shadow moved near the hotel door and detached itself from shadow and came to the curb, a white shirt glinting within a spread coat; and as the car swung slowly toward another street, the man hailed them. Bayard stopped and the man came through the blanched dust and laid his hand on the door.
“Hi, Buck,” Mitch said. “You’re up pretty late, ain’t you?”
The man had a sober, good-natured horse’s face. He wore a metal star on his unbuttoned waistcoat. His coat humped slightly over his hip. “What you boys doin’?” he asked. “Been to a dance?”
“Serenading,” Bayard answered. “Want a drink, Buck?”
“No, much obliged.” He stood with his hand on the door, gravely and good-naturedly serious. “Ain’t you fellers out kind of late, yo’selves?”
“It is gettin’ on,” Mitch agreed. The marshal lifted his foot to the running board. Beneath his hat his eyes were in shadow. “We’re going home now,” Mitch said. The other pondered quietly, and Bayard added:
“Sure; we’re on our way home now.”
The marshal moved his head slightly and spoke to the negroes. “I reckon you boys are about ready to turn in, ain’t you?”
“Yes, suh,” the negroes answered, and they got out and lifted the viol out. Bayard gave Reno a bill and they thanked him and said good night and picked up the viol and departed quietly down a side street. The marshal turned his head again.
“Ain’t that yo’ car in front of Rogers’ café, Mitch?” he asked.
“Reckon so. That’s where I left it.”
“Well, suppose you run Hub out home, lessen he’s goin’ to stay in town tonight. Bayard better come with me.”
“Aw, hell, Buck,” Mitch protested.
“What for?” Bayard demanded.
“His folks are worried about him,” the other answered.
“They ain’t seen hide nor hair of him since that stallion throwed him. Where’s yo’ bandage, Bayard?”