“Where did you get those clothes?” The sunlight glinted on Miss Jenny’s shears, and Miss Benbow in her white dress and soft straw hat turned also and looked at him with a strange expression.
“Dey’s Caspey’s,” Isom answered. “I jes’ bor’d ’um.”
“Caspey?” Miss Jenny repeated. “Is he home?”
“Yessum, He got in las’ night on de nine-thirty.”
“Last night, did he? Where is he now? Asleep, I reckon?”
“Yessum, Dat’s whar he wuz when I lef’ home.”
“And I reckon that’s how you borrowed his uniform,” Miss Jenny said tartly. “Well, let him sleep this morning. Give him one day to get over the war. But if it made a fool out of him like it did out of Bayard, he’d better put that thing on again and go back to it. I’ll declare, men can’t seem to stand anything.” She went on, the guest in her straight white dress following.
“You are awfully hard on men, not to have a husband to bother with, Miss Jenny,” she said. “Besides, you’re judging all men by your Sartorises.”
“They ain’t my Sartorises,” Miss Jenny disclaimed promptly; “I just inherited ’em. But you just wait: you’ll have one of your own to bother with soon; you just wait until Horace gets home, then see how long it takes him to get over it. Men can’t stand anything,” she repeated, “Can’t even stand helling around with no worry and no responsibility and no limit to all the meanness they can think about wanting to do.
Do you think a man could sit day after day and month after month in a house miles from nowhere and spend the time between casualty lists tearing up bedclothes and window curtains and table linen to make lint, and watching sugar and flour and meat dwindling away, and using pine knots for light because there aren’t any candles and no candlesticks to put ’em in if there were, and hiding in nigger cabins while drunken Yankee generals set fire to the house your great-great-grandfather built and you and all your folks were born in?
Don’t talk to me about men suffering in war.” Miss Jenny snipped larkspur savagely. “Just you wait until Horace comes home; then you’ll see. Just a good excuse for ’em to make nuisances of themselves and stay in the way while the womenfolks are trying to clean up the mess they left with their fighting. John at least had consideration enough, after he’d gone and gotten himself into something where he had no business, not to come back and worry everybody to distraction. But Bayard now, coming back in the middle of it and having everybody thinking he was settled down at last, teaching at that Memphis flying school, and then marrying that fool girl.”
“Miss Jenny!”
“Well, I don’t mean that, but she’d ought’ve been spanked, hard. I know: didn’t I do the same thing, myself? It was all that harness that Bayard wore. Talk about men being taken in by a uniform!” She clipped larkspur. “Dragging me up there to the wedding, mind you, with a church full of rented swords and some of Bayard’s pupils trying to drop roses on ’em when they came out. I reckon some of ’em were not his pupils, because one of ’em finally did drop a handful that missed everything and fell in the street.”
She snipped larkspur savagely. “I had dinner with ’em one night. Sat in the hotel an hour until they remembered to come for me. Then we stopped at a delicatessen and Bayard and Caroline got out and went in and came back with about a bushel of packages and dumped ’em into the car, where they leaked grease on my new stockings.
That was the dinner I’d been invited to, mind you; there wasn’t a sign of anything that looked or smelled like a stove in the whole place. I didn’t offer to help ’em. I told Caroline I didn’t know anything about that sort of housekeeping because my folks were old-fashioned enough to cook food.
“Then the others came in—some of Bayard’s soldier friends, and a drove of other folks’ wives, near as I could gather. Young women that ought to’ve been at home, seeing about supper, gabbling and screeching in that silly way young married women have when they’re doing something they hope their husbands won’t like. They were all unwrapping bottles—about two dozen, I reckon, and Bayard and Caroline came in with that silver I gave ’em and monogrammed napkins and that delicatessen fodder that tasted like swamp grass, on paper plates. We ate it there, sitting on the floor or standing up or just wherever you happened to be.
“That was Caroline’s idea of keeping house. She said they’d settle down when they got old, if the war was over by then. About thirty-five, I suppose she meant. Thin as a rail; there wouldn’t have been much to spank. But she’d ought to have had it, just the same. Soon as she found out about the baby, she named it. Named it nine months before it was born and told everybody about it. Used to talk about it like it was her grandfather or something. Always saying Bayard won’t let me do this or that or the other.”
Miss Jenny continued to clip larkspur, the caller tall in a white dress beside her. The fine and huge simplicity of the house rose among thickening trees, the garden lay in sunlight bright with bloom, myriad with scent and with a drowsy humming of bees—a steady golden sound, as of sunlight become audible—all the impalpable veil of the immediate, the familiar; just beyond it a girl with a bronze swirling of hair and a small, supple body in a constant epicene unrepose, a dynamic fixation like that of carven sexless figures caught in moments of action, striving, a mechanism all of whose members must move in performing the most trivial action, her wild hands not accusing but passionate still beyond the veil impalpable but sufficient.
Miss Jenny stooped above the flower bed, her narrow back, though stooping, erect still, indomitable. A thrush flashed modestly across the bright air and into the magnolia tree in a dying parabola. “And then, when he had to go back to the war, of course he brought her out here and left her on my hands.” The caller stood motionless in her white dress, and Miss Jenny said, “No, I don’t mean that.” She snipped larkspur.
“Poor women,” she said, “I reckon we do have to take our revenge wherever and whenever we can get it. Only she ought to’ve taken it out on Bayard.”
“When she died,” Narcissa said, “and he couldn’t know about it; couldn’t have come to her if he had? And you can say that?”
“Bayard love anybody, that cold devil?” Miss Jenny clipped larkspur. “He never cared a snap of his fingers for anybody in his life except John.” She snipped larkspur savagely. “Swelling around here like it was our fault, like we made ’em go to that war. And now he’s got to have an automobile, got to go all the way to Memphis to buy one. An automobile in Bayard Sartoris’ barn; mind you; him that won’t even lend the bank’s money to a man that owns one. . . . Do you want some sweet peas?”
“Yes, please,” Narcissa answered. Miss Jenny straightened up, then she stopped utterly still.
“Just look yonder, will you?” She pointed with the shears. “That’s how they suffer from war, poor things.” Beyond a frame of sweet peas Isom in his khaki strode solemnly back and forth. Upon his right shoulder was a hoe and on his face an expression of rapt absorption, and as he reversed at the end of his beat be murmured to himself in measured singsong.
“You, Isom!” Miss Jenny shouted.
He halted in mid stride, still at shoulder arms.
“Ma’am?” he said mildly. Miss Jenny continued to glare at him, and his military bearing faded and he lowered his piece and executed a sort of effacing movement within his martial shroud.
“Put that hoe down and bring that basket over here. That’s the first time in your life you ever picked up a garden tool of your own free will. I wish I could discover the kind of uniform that would make you dig in the ground with it; I’d certainly buy you one.”
“Yessum.”
“If you want to play soldier, you go off somewhere with Bayard and do it. I can raise flowers without any help from the army,” she added, turning to the guest with her handful of larkspur. “And what are you laughing at?” she demanded.
“You both look so funny,” the younger woman explained. “You looked so much more like a soldier than poor Isom, for all his uniform.” She touched her eyes with her fingertips. “I’m sorry: please forgive me for laughing.”
“Hmph,” Miss Jenny sniffed. She put the larkspur into the basket and went on to the sweet peas and snipped again, viciously. The guest followed, as did Isom with the basket; and presently Miss Jenny had done with sweet peas and she
