Horace descended. Snopes went on, the soiled hat towering half a head above any other. Horace looked at the porter.
“He gave it to you, did he?”
The porter chucked the cigar on his palm. He put it in his pocket.
“What’re you going to do with it?” Horace said.
“I wouldn’t give it to nobody I know,” the porter said.
“Does he do this very often?”
“Three-four times a year. Seems like I always git him, too . . . Thank’ suh.”
Horace saw Snopes enter the waiting-room; the soiled hat, the vast neck, passed again out of his mind. He filled the pipe again.
From a block away he heard the Memphis-bound train come in. It was at the platform when he reached the station. Beside the open vestibule Snopes stood, talking with two youths in new straw hats, with something vaguely mentorial about his thick shoulders and his gestures. The train whistled. The two youths got on. Horace stepped back around the corner of the station.
When his train came he saw Snopes get on ahead of him and enter the smoker. Horace knocked out his pipe and entered the day coach and found a seat at the rear, facing backward.
XX
As Horace was leaving the station at Jefferson a townward-bound car slowed beside him. It was the taxi which he used to go out to his sister’s. “I’ll give you a ride, this time,” the driver said.
“Much obliged,” Horace said. He got in. When the car entered the square, the courthouse clock said only twenty minutes past eight, yet there was no light in the hotel room window. “Maybe the child’s asleep,” Horace said. He said, “If you’ll just drop me at the hotel—” Then he found that the driver was watching him, with a kind of discreet curiosity.
“You been out of town today,” the driver said.
“Yes,” Horace said. “What is it? What happened here today?”
“She aint staying at the hotel any more. I heard Mrs Walker taken her in at the jail.”
“Oh,” Horace said. “I’ll get out at the hotel.”
The lobby was empty. After a moment the proprietor appeared: a tight, iron-gray man with a toothpick, his vest open upon a neat paunch. The woman was not there. “It’s these church ladies,” he said. He lowered his voice, the toothpick in his fingers. “They come in this morning. A committee of them. You know how it is, I reckon.”
“You mean to say you let the Baptist church dictate who your guests shall be?”
“It’s them ladies. You know how it is, once they got set on a thing. A man might just as well give up and do like they say. Of course, with me—”
“By God, if there was a man—”
“Shhhhhh,” the proprietor said. “You know how it is when them—”
“But of course there wasn’t a man who would— And you call yourself one, that’ll let—”
“I got a certain position to keep up myself,” the proprietor said in a placative tone. “If you come right down to it.” He stepped back a little, against the desk. “I reckon I can say who’ll stay in my house and who won’t,” he said. “And I know some more folks around here that better do the same thing. Not no mile off, neither. I aint beholden to no man. Not to you, noways.”
“Where is she now? or did they drive her out of town?”
“That aint my affair, where folks go after they check out,” the proprietor said, turning his back. He said: “I reckon somebody took her in, though.”
“Yes,” Horace said. “Christians. Christians.” He turned toward the door. The proprietor called him. He turned. The other was taking a paper down from a pigeon-hole. Horace returned to the desk. The paper lay on the desk. The proprietor leaned with his hands on the desk, the toothpick tilted in his mouth.
“She said you’d pay it,” he said.
He paid the bill, counting the money down with shaking hands. He entered the jail yard and went to the door and knocked. After a while a lank, slattern woman came with a lamp, holding a man’s coat across her breast. She peered at him and said before he could speak:
“You’re lookin fer Miz Goodwin, I reckon.”
“Yes. How did— Did—”
“You’re the lawyer. I’ve seed you befo. She’s hyer. Sleepin now.”
“Thanks,” Horace said. “Thanks. I knew that someone—I didn’t believe that—”
“I reckon I kin always find a bed fer a woman and child,” the woman said. “I dont keer whut Ed says. Was you wantin her special? She’s sleepin now.”
“No, no; I just wanted to—”
The woman watched him across the lamp. “’Taint no need botherin her, then. You kin come around in the mawnin and git her a boa’din-place. ’Taint no hurry.”
On the next afternoon Horace went out to his sister’s, again in a hired car. He told her what had happened. “I’ll have to take her home now.”
“Not into my house,” Narcissa said.
He looked at her. Then he began to fill his pipe slowly and carefully. “It’s not a matter of choice, my dear. You must see that.”
“Not in my house,” Narcissa said. “I thought we settled that.”
He struck the match and lit the pipe and put the match carefully into the fireplace. “Do you realise that she has been practically turned into the streets? That—”
“That shouldn’t be a hardship. She ought to be used to that.”
He looked at her. He put the pipe in his mouth and smoked it to a careful coal, watching his hand tremble upon the stem. “Listen. By tomorrow they will probably ask her to leave town. Just because she happens not to be married to the man whose child she carries about these sanctified streets. But who told them? That’s what I want to know. I know that nobody in Jefferson knew it except—”
“You were the first I heard tell it,” Miss Jenny said. “But, Narcissa, why—”
“Not in my house,” Narcissa said.
“Well,” Horace said. He drew the pipe to an even coal. “That settles it, of course,” he said, in a dry, light voice.
She rose. “Will you stay here tonight?”
“What? No. No. I’ll—I told her I’d come for her at the jail and . . .” He sucked at his pipe. “Well, I don’t suppose it matters. I hope it doesn’t.”
She was still paused, turning. “Will you stay or not?”
“I could even tell her I had a puncture,” Horace said. “Time’s not such a bad thing after all. Use it right, and you can stretch anything out, like a rubberband, until it busts somewhere, and there you are, with all tragedy and despair in two little knots between thumb and finger of each hand.”
“Will you stay, or wont you stay, Horace?” Narcissa said.
“I think I’ll stay,” Horace said.
He was in bed. He had been lying in the dark for about an hour, when the door of the room opened, felt rather than seen or heard. It was his sister. He rose to his elbow. She took shape vaguely, approaching the bed. She came and looked down at him. “How much longer are you going to keep this up?” she said.
“Just until morning,” he said. “I’m going back to town. You need not see me again.”
She stood beside the bed, motionless. After a moment her cold unbending voice came down to him: “You know what I mean.”
“I promise not to bring her into your house again. You can send Isom in to hide in the canna bed.” She said nothing. “Surely you don’t object to my living there, do you?”
“I dont care where you live. The question is, where I live. I live here, in this town. I’ll have to stay here. But you’re a man. It doesn’t matter to you. You can go away.”
“Oh,” he said. He lay quite still. She stood above him, motionless. They spoke quietly, as though they were discussing wallpaper, food.
“Dont you see, this is my home, where I must spend the rest of my life. Where I was born. I dont care where else you go not what you do. I dont care how many women you have nor who they are. But I cannot have my brother mixed up with a woman people are talking about. I dont expect you to have consideration for me; I ask you to have consideration for our father and mother. Take her to Memphis. They say you refused to let the man have bond to get out of jail; take her on to Memphis. You can think of a lie to tell him about that, too.”
“Oh. So you think that, do you?”
“I dont think anything about it. I don’t care. That’s what people in town think. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. What I do mind is, every day you force me to have to tell lies for you. Go away from here, Horace. Anybody but you would realise it’s a case of cold-blooded murder.”
“And over her, of course. I suppose they say that too, out of their odorous and omnipotent sanctity. Do they say yet that it was I killed him?”
“I dont see that it makes any difference who did it. The question is, are you going to stay mixed up with it? When people already believe you and she are slipping into my house at night.” Her cold, unbending voice shaped the words in the darkness above him. Through the window, upon the blowing darkness, came the drowsy dissonance of cicada and cricket.
“Do you believe that?” he said.
“It doesn’t matter what I believe. Go on away, Horace. I ask it.”
“And leave her—them, flat?”
“Hire a lawyer, if he still
