The paper was a single sheet of foolscap; it bore writing in a frank, open script that at first glance divulged no individuality whatever; a hand youthful, yet at the same time so blandly and neatly unsecretive that presently you wondered a little:
“You did not answer mine of 25th. I did not expect you answer it yet. You will answer soon I can wait. I will not harm you I am square and honest you will lern when our ways come to gether. I do not expect you answer yet but you know where you make a sign.”
Miss Jenny refolded the paper with a gesture of fine and delicate distaste. “I’d burn this thing, if it wasn’t the only thing we have to catch him with. I’ll give it to Bayard tonight.”
“No, no,” the other protested quickly, extending her hand, “please don’t. Let me have it and tear it up.”
“It’s the only evidence, child—this and the other one. We’ll get a detective.”
“No, no; please! I don’t want anybody else to know about it. Please, Miss Jenny.” She reached her hand again.
“You want to keep it,” Miss Jenny accused coldly. “Just like a young fool woman, to be flattered by a thing like this.”
“I’ll tear it up,” the other repeated. “I would have sooner, but I wanted to tell somebody. It—it—I thought I wouldn’t feel so filthy, after I had shown it to somebody else. Let me have it, please.”
“Fiddlesticks. Why should you feel filthy? You haven’t encouraged it, have you?”
“Please, Miss Jenny.”
But Miss Jenny still held on to it. “Don’t be a fool,” she snapped. “How can this thing make you feel filthy? Any young woman is liable to get an anonymous letter. And a lot of ’em like it. We are all convinced that men feel that way about us, and we can’t help but admire the one that’s got the courage to tell us, no matter who he is.”
“If he’d just signed his name. I wouldn’t mind who it was. But like this . . . Please, Miss Jenny.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Miss Jenny repeated. “How can we find who it is if you destroy the evidence?”
“I don’t want to know.” Miss Jenny released the paper and Narcissa tore it to bits and cast them over the rail and rubbed her hands on her dress. “I don’t want to know. I want to forget all about it.”
“Nonsense. You’re dying to know, right now. I bet you look at every man you pass and wonder if it’s him. And as long as you don’t do something about it, it’ll go on. Get worse, probably. You better let me tell Bayard.”
“No, no. I’d hate for him to know, to think that I would might have . . . It’s all right: I’ll just burn them up after this, without opening them. . . . I really must go.”
“Of course: you’ll throw ’em right into the stove,” Miss Jenny agreed with cold irony.
Narcissa descended the steps and Miss Jenny came forward into the sunlight again, letting her glasses whip back into the case. “It’s your business, of course. But I’d not stand for it, if ’twas me. But then, I ain’t twenty-six years old. . . . Well, come out again when you get another one, or you want some more flowers.”
“Yes, I will Thank you for these.”
“And let me know what you hear from Horace. Thank the Lord, it’s just a glass-blowing machine and not a war widow.”
“Yes, I will. Good-bye.” She went on through the dappled shade in her straight white dress and her basket of flowers stippled upon it, and got in her car. The top was back and she put her hat on and started the engine. She looked back again and waved her hand. “Good-bye.”
The negro had moved down the road; slowly, and stopped again, and he was watching her covertly as she approached. As she passed he looked full at her and she knew he was about to hail her. She opened the throttle and passed him with increasing speed and drove swiftly on to town, where she lived in a brick house among cedars on a hill.
She was arranging the larkspur in a dull lemon urn on the piano. Aunt Sally Wyatt rocked steadily in her chair beside the window, clapping her feet flatly on the floor at each stroke. Her work basket sat on the window ledge between the gentle billowing of the curtains, her ebony walking stick leaned beside it.
“And you were out there two hours,” she said, “and never saw him at all?”
“He wasn’t there,” Narcissa answered, “He’s gone to Memphis.”
Aunt Sally rocked steadily. “If I was them, I’d make him stay there. I wouldn’t have that boy around me, blood or no blood. . . . What did he go to Memphis for? I thought that aeroplane what-do-you-call-it was broke up.”
“He went on business, I suppose.”
“What business has he got in Memphis? Bayard Sartoris has got more sense than to turn over any business to that harebrained fool.”
“I don’t know,” Narcissa answered, arranging the larkspur. “He’ll be back soon, I suppose. You can ask him then.”
“Me ask him? I never said two words to him in his life. And I don’t intend to. I been used to associating with gentlefolks.”
Narcissa broke some of the stems, arranging the blooms in a pattern. “What’s he done that a gentleman doesn’t do, Aunt Sally?”
“Why, jumping off water tanks and going up in balloons just to scare folks. You think I’d have that boy around me? I’d have him locked up in the insane asylum, if I was Bayard and Jenny.”
“He didn’t jump off the tank. He just swung off of it on a rope and dived into the swimming-pool. And it was John that went up in the balloon.”
“That wasn’t what I heard. I heard he jumped off that tank, across a whole row of freight cars and lumber piles, and didn’t miss the edge of the pool an inch.”
“No, he didn’t. He swung on a rope from the top of a house and then dived into the pool. The rope was tied to the tank.”
“Well, didn’t he have to jump over a lot of lumber and freight cars? And couldn’t he have broken his neck just as easy that way as jumping off the tank?”
“Yes,” Narcissa answered.
“There! What’d I tell you? And what was the use of it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t. That was the reason he did it.” Aunt Sally rocked triumphantly for a while Narcissa put the last touches to the blue pattern of the larkspur. A tortoiseshell cat bunched suddenly and silently on the window beside the work basket, with an effect as of sleight-of-hand. Still crouching, it blinked into the room for a moment, then it sank to its belly and with arched neck fell to grooming its shoulder with a narrow pink tongue. Narcissa moved to the window and laid her hand on the creature’s sleek back.
“And then, going up in that balloon, when—”
“That wasn’t Bayard,” Narcissa repeated. “That was John.”
“That wasn’t what I heard. I heard it was the other one and that Bayard and Jenny were both begging him with tears in their eyes not to do it. I heard—”
“Neither of them were there. Bayard wasn’t even there. It was John did it. He did it because the man that came with the balloon got sick. John went up in it so the country people wouldn’t be disappointed. I was there.”
“Stood there and let him do it, did you, when you could ’a’ telephoned Jenny or walked across the square to the bank and got Bayard? You stood there and never opened your mouth, did you?”
“Yes,” Narcissa answered.
Stood there beside Horace in the slow, intent ring of country people, watching the globe swelling and tugging at its ropes, watched John Sartoris in a faded flannel shirt and corduroy breeches while the carnival man explained the rip cord and the parachute to him; stood there feeling her breath going out faster than she could draw it in again, and watched the thing lurch into the air with John sitting on a frail trapeze bar swinging beneath it, with eyes she could not close; saw the balloon and people and all swirl slowly upward and then found herself clinging to Horace behind the shelter of a wagon, trying to get her breath.
He landed three miles away in a brier thicket and disengaged the parachute and regained the road and hailed a passing negro in a wagon. A mile from town they met old Bayard driving furiously in the carriage, and the two vehicles stopped side by side in the road while old Bayard in the one exhausted the accumulated fury of his rage and in the other his grandson sat in his shredded clothes, and on his scratched face that look of one who had gamed for an instant a desire so fine that its escape was a purification, not a loss.
The next day, as she was passing a store, he emerged with that abrupt violence which he had in common with his brother, pulling short up to avoid a collision with her.
“Oh, ex—Why, hello,” he said. Beneath the criss-crosses of tape his face was merry and bold and wild, and he wore no hat. For a moment she gazed at him with wide, hopeless eyes, then she clapped her hand to
