“We’re going to look over a location for a tennis court. I think I’ll take up tennis, myself,” he told Mrs. Marders with heavy irony. It was later still when they returned. Mrs. Marders was gone and Belle sat alone, with a magazine. A youth in a battered Ford had called for the girl Frankie, but another young man had dropped in, and when Horace and Harry came up the three youths clamored politely for Harry to join them.
“Take Horace here,” Harry said, obviously pleased. “He’ll give you a run for your money.” But Horace demurred and the three continued to importune Harry.
“Lemme get my racket, then,” he said finally, and Horace followed the heavy scuttling of his backside across the court. Belle looked briefly up.
“Did you find a place?”
“Yes,” Harry answered, uncasing his racket again; “where I can play myself, sometimes. A place too far from the street for everybody that comes along to see it and stop.” But Belle was reading again. Harry unscrewed his racket press and removed it.
“I’ll go in one set; then you and I can get in a fast one before dark,” he told Horace.
“Yes,” Horace agreed. He sat down and watched Harry stride heavily on to the court and take his position, watched the first serve. Then Belle’s magazine rustled and slapped on to the table.
“Come,” she said, rising. Horace rose, and Belle preceded him and they crossed the lawn and entered the house. Rachel moved about in the kitchen, and they went on through the house, where all noises were remote and the furniture gleamed peacefully indistinct in the dying evening light. Belle slid her hand into his, clutching his hand against her silken thigh, and led him on through a dusky passage and into her music room. This room was quiet too and empty and she stopped against him half turning, and they kissed. But she freed her mouth presently and moved again, and he drew the piano bench out and they sat on opposite sides of it and kissed again. “You haven’t told me you love me,” Belle said, touching his face with her finger tips, and the fine devastation of his hair, “not in a long time.”
“Not since yesterday,” Horace agreed, but he told her, she leaning her breast against him and listening with a sort of rapt, voluptuous inattention, like a great, still cat; and when he had done and sat touching her face and her hair with his delicate wild hands, she removed her breast and opened the piano and touched the keys. Saccharine melodies she played, from memory and in the current mode, that you might hear on any vaudeville stage, and with a shallow skill, a feeling for their oversweet nuances. They sat thus for some time while the light faded, Belle in another temporary vacuum of discontent, building for herself a world in which she moved romantically, finely, and a little tragically, with Horace sitting beside her and watching both Belle in her self-imposed and tragic role, and himself performing his part like the old actor whose hair is thin and whose profile is escaping him via his chin, but who can play to any cue at a moment’s notice while the younger men chew their bitter thumbs in the wings.
Presently the rapid heavy concussions of Harry’s feet thumped again on the stairs mounting, and the harsh wordless uproar of his voice as he led someone else in the back way and up to his bathroom. Belle stopped her hands and leaned against him and kissed him again, clinging. “This is intolerable,” she said, freeing her mouth with a movement of her head. For a moment she resisted against his arm, then her hands crashed discordantly upon the keys and slid through Horace’s hair and down his cheeks tightening. She freed her mouth again. “Now, sit over there.”
He obeyed; she on the piano bench was in half shadow. Twilight was almost accomplished; only the line of her bent head and her back, tragic and still, making him feel young again. We do turn corners upon ourselves, like suspicious old ladies spying on servants, Horace thought. No, like boys trying to head off a parade. “There’s always divorce,” he said.
“To marry again?” Her hands trailed off into chords; merged, faded again into a minor in one hand. Overhead Harry moved with his heavy staccato tread, shaking the house. “You’d make a rotten husband.”
“I won’t as long as I’m not married,” Horace answered.
She said, “Come here,” and he went to her, and in the dusk she was again tragic and young and familiar with a haunting sense of loss, and he knew the sad fecundity of the world and time’s hopeful unillusion that fools itself. “I want to have your child, Horace,” she said, and then her own child came up the hall and stood diffidently in the door.
For a moment Belle was an animal awkward and mad with fear. She surged away from him in a mad, spurning movement; her hands crashed on the keys as she controlled her instinctive violent escape that left in the dusk a mindless protective antagonism, pervading, in steady cumulate waves, directed at Horace as well.
“Come in, Titania,” Horace said.
The little girl stood diffidently in silhouette. Belle’s voice was sharp with relief. “Well, what do you want? Sit over there,” she hissed at Horace. “What do you want, Belle?” Horace drew away a little, but without rising.
“I’ve got a new story to tell you, soon,” he said. But little Belle stood yet, as though she had not heard, and her mother said:
“Go on and play, Belle. Why did you come in the house? It isn’t suppertime yet.”
“Everybody’s gone home,” she answered. “I haven’t got anybody to play with.”
“Go to the kitchen and talk to Rachel, then,” Belle said. She struck the keys again, harshly. “You worry me to death, hanging around the house.” The little girl stood for a moment longer; then she turned obediently and went away. “Sit over there,” Belle repeated. Horace resumed his chair and Belle played again, loudly and swiftly, with cold hysterical skill. Overhead Harry thumped again across the floor; they descended the stairs. Harry was still talking; the voices passed on toward the rear, ceased. Belle continued to play; still about him in the darkening room that blind protective antagonism, like a muscular contraction that remains after the impulse of fright has died. Without turning her head she said, “Are you going to stay to supper?”
He was not, he answered, waking suddenly. She did not rise with him, did not turn her head, and he let himself out the front door and into the late spring twilight, where was already a faint star above the windless trees. On the drive just without the garage, Harry’s new car stood. At the moment he was doing something to the engine of it while the house-yard-stable-boy held a patent trouble-lamp above the beetling crag of his head, and his daughter and Rachel, holding tools or detached sections of the car’s vitals, leaned their intent dissimilar faces across his bent back and into the soft bluish glare of the light. Horace went on homeward. Twilight, evening, came swiftly. Before he reached the corner where he turned, the street lamps sputtered and failed, then glared above the intersections, beneath the arching trees.
3
It was the evening of little Belle’s recital, the climacteric of her musical year. During the whole evening Belle had not looked at him, had said no word to him, even when, in the departing crush at the door and while Harry was trying to persuade him upstairs for a nightcap, he felt her beside him for an instant, smelled the heavy scent she used. But she said no word to him even then, and he put Harry aside at last and the door closed on little Belle and on Harry’s glazed dome, and Horace turned into the darkness and found that Narcissa hadn’t waited. She was halfway to the street.
“If you’re going my way, I’ll walk along with you,” he called to her. She made no reply, neither did she slacken her pace nor increase it when he joined her.
“Why is it,” he began, “that grown people will go to so much trouble to make children do ridiculous things, do you suppose? Belle had a houseful of people she doesn’t care anything about and most of whom don’t approve of her, and kept little Belle up three hours past her bedtime; and the result is, Harry’s about half tight, and Belle is in a bad humor, and little Belle is too excited to go to sl
eep, and you and I wish we were home and are sorry we didn’t stay there.”
“Why do you go there, then?” Narcissa asked. Horace was suddenly stilled. They walked on through the darkness, toward the next street light. Against it branches hung like black coral in a yellow sea.
“Oh,” Horace said. Then: “I saw that old cat talking with you.”
“Why do you call Mrs. Marders an old cat? Because she told me something that concerns me and that everybody else seems to know already?”
“So that’s who told you, is it? I wondered. . . .” He slid his arm within her unresponsive one. “Dear old Narcy.” They passed through the dappled shadows beneath the light, went on into darkness again.
“Is it true?” she asked.
“You forget that lying is a struggle for survival,” he said, “little puny man’s way of dragging circumstance about to fit his preconception of himself as a figure in the world. Revenge on the sinister gods.”
“Is it true?” she persisted. They walked on, arm in arm, she gravely insistent and waiting, he shaping and discarding phrases in his mind, finding time to be amused at his own fantastic impotence in the presence of her constancy.
“People don’t usually lie about things that don’t concern them,” he answered wearily. “They are impervious to the world, even if they aren’t to life. Not when the actuality is so much more diverting than their imaginings could be,” he added. She freed her arm with grave finality.
“Narcy—”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t call me that,” The next corner, beneath the next light, was theirs; they would turn there. Above the arched canyon of the street the sinister gods stared down with pale unwinking eyes. Horace thrust his hands into his jacket and for a space he was stilled again while his fingers learned the unfamiliar object they had found in his pocket. Then he drew it forth: a sheet of heavy notepaper, folded twice and impregnated with a fading heavy scent. A familiar scent, yet baffling for the moment, like a face watching him from an arras. He knew the face would emerge in a moment, but as he held the note in his fingers and sought the face through the corridors of his present distraction, his sister spoke suddenly and hard at his side.
“You’ve got the smell of her all over you. Oh, Harry, she’s dirty!”
“I know,” he answered unhappily. “I know.”
It was now well into June, and the scent of Miss Jenny’s transplanted jasmine drifted steadily into the house and filled it with constant cumulate waves like a fading resonance of viols. The earlier flowers were gone, and the birds had finished eating the strawberries and now sat about the fig bushes all day, waiting for them to ripen; zinnia and delphinium bloomed without any assistance from Isom, who, since Caspey had more or less returned to normalcy and laying-by time was yet a. while away, might be found on the shady side of the privet hedge along the garden fence, trimming the leaves one by one from a single twig with a pair of mule shears until Miss Jenny returned to the house; whereupon he retreated himself and lay on the creekbank for the rest of the afternoon, his hat over his eyes and a cane fishing pole propped between his toes.
Simon pottered querulously about the place. His linen duster and top hat gathered chaff and dust on the nail in the harness room, and the horses waxed fat and lazy and insolent in the pasture. The duster and hat came down from the nail and the horses were harnessed to the carriage but once a week now—on Sundays, to drive in to town to church. Miss Jenny said she was too far along to jeopardize salvation by driving to church at fifty miles an hour; that she had as many sins as her ordinary behavior could take care of particularly as she had old Bayard’s soul to get into heaven somehow also, what with him and young Bayard tearing: around the country every afternoon at the imminent risk of their necks. About young Bayard’s soul Miss Jenny did not alarm herself at all: he had no soul.
Meanwhile he rode about the farm and harried the negro tenants in his cold fashion, and in two-dollar khaki breeches and a pair of field boots that had cost fourteen guineas he tinkered with farming machinery and with the tractor he had persuaded old Bayard to buy: for the time being he had become almost civilized again. He went to town only occasionally now, and often on horseback, and all in all his days had become so usefully innocuous that both his aunt and his grandfather were growing a little nervously anticipatory.
“Mark my words,” Miss Jenny told Narcissa on the day she drove out again, “he’s storing up devilment that’s going to burst loose all at once, some day. And then there’ll be hell to pay. Lord knows what it’ll be—maybe he and Isom will take his car and that tractor and hold a steeple-chase with ’em . . . What did you come out for? Got another letter?”
“I’ve got several more,” Narcissa answered lightly. “I’m saving them until I get enough for a book: then I’ll bring them all out for you to read.” Miss Jenny sat opposite her, erect as a crack guardsman, with that cold briskness of hers that caused agents and strangers to stumble through their errands with premonitions of failure before they began. The guest sat motionless, her. limp straw hat on her knees. “I just came to see you,” she added, and for a moment her face held such grave and still despair that Miss Jenny sat more erect yet and stared at her guest with her piercing gray eyes.
“Why, what is it, child? Did the man walk into your house?”
“No, no.” The look was gone, but still Miss Jenny watched her with those keen old eyes that seemed to see so much more than you thought—or wished. “Shall I play a while? It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Well,” Miss Jenny agreed, “if you want to.”
There was dust on the piano. Narcissa opened it with a fine gesture. “If you’ll let me get a cloth—”
“Here, lemme dust it,” Miss Jenny said, and she caught up her skirt by the hem and mopped the keyboard violently. “There, that’ll do.” Then she drew her chair from behind the instrument and seated herself. She still watched the other’s profile with speculation and a little curiosity, but presently the old tunes stirred her memory again, and in a while her eyes softened, and the other and the trouble that had shown momentarily in her face were lost in Miss Jenny’s own vanquished and abiding dead days, and it was some time before she realized that Narcissa was weeping quietly while she played.
Miss Jenny leaned forward and touched her arm. “Now, you tell me what it is,” she commanded. And Narcissa told her in her grave contralto, still weeping quietly.
“Humph,” Miss Jenny said. “That’s to be expected of a man that hasn’t any more to do than Horace has. I don’t see why you are so upset over it.”
“But that woman,” Narcissa wailed suddenly, like a little girl, burying her face in her hands. “She’s so dirty!”
Miss Jenny dug a man’s handkerchief from the pocket of her skirt and gave it to the other. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Don’t she wash often enough?”
“Not that way. I m-mean she’s—she’s—” Narcissa turned suddenly and laid her head on the piano.
“Oh,” Miss Jenny said. “All women are, if that’s what you mean.” She sat stiffly indomitable, contemplating the other’s shrinking shoulders. “Hmph,” she said again, “Horace has spent so much time being educated that he never has learned anything. . . . Why didn’t you break it up in time? Didn’t you see it coming?”
The other wept more quietly now. She sat up and dried her eyes on Miss Jenny’s handkerchief. “It started before he went away. Don’t you remember?”
“That’s so. I do sort of remember a lot of women’s gabble. Who told you about it, anyway? Horace?”
“Mrs. Marders did. And then Horace did. But I never thought that he’d—I never thought—” Again her head dropped to the piano, hidden in her arms. “I wouldn’t have treated Horace that way,” she wailed.
“Sarah Marders, was it? I might have known. . . . I admire strong character, even if it is bad,” Miss Je
nny stated. “Well, crying won’t help any.” She rose briskly. “We’ll think what to do about it. Only I’d let him go ahead: it’ll do him good if she’ll just turn around and make a doormat of him. . . . Too bad Harry hasn’t got the spunk to . . . But I reckon he’ll be glad; I know I would. . . . There, there,” she said, at the other’s movement of alarm, “I don’t reckon Harry’ll hurt him. Dry your face, now. You better go to the bathroom and fix up. Bayard’ll be coming in soon, and you don’t want him to see you’ve been crying, you know.” Narcissa glanced swiftly at the door and dabbed at her face with Miss Jenny’s handkerchief.
Then he would seek her through the house, and cross the drive and descend the lawn in the sunny afternoon to where she sat in the white dresses he loved beneath the oak, into which a mockingbird came each afternoon to sing, bringing her the result of his latest venture in glass-blowing. He had five now, in different colors and all nearly perfect, and each of them had a name. And as he finished them and while they were scarce cooled, he must bring them across the lawn to where she sat with a book or with a startled caller perhaps—in his stained disheveled clothes and his sooty hands in which the vase lay demure and fragile as a bubble, and with his face blackened too with smoke and a little mad, passionate and fine and austere.
4
For a time the earth held him in a hiatus that might have been called contentment. He was up at sunrise, planting things in the ground and watching them grow and tending them; he cursed and harried niggers and mules into motion and kept them there, and put the grist mill into running shape and taught Caspey to drive the tractor, and came in at mealtimes and at night smelling of machine oil and of stables and of the earth, and went to bed with grateful muscles and with the sober rhythms of the earth in his body and so to sleep. But he still waked at times in the peaceful darkness of his room and without previous warning, tense and sweating with old terror. Then, momentarily, the world was laid away and he was a trapped beast in the high blue, mad for life, trapped in the very cunning fabric that had betrayed him who had dared chance too much, and he thought again if, when the bullet found you, you could only crash upward, burst; anything but earth. Not death, no: It was the crash you had to live through so many times before you struck that filled your throat with vomit.