Old Bayard held the rapier upon his hands for a while, feeling the balance of it. It was just such an implement as a Sartoris would consider the proper equipment for raising tobacco in a virgin wilderness, it and the scarlet heels and the ruffled wristbands in which he broke the earth and fought his stealthy and simple neighbors.
He laid it aside. Next came a heavy cavalry saber, and a rosewood case containing two dueling pistols with silver mountings and the lean, deceptive delicacy of racehorses, and what old man Falls had called “that ’ere dang der’nger.” It was a stubby, evil-looking thing with its three barrels, viciously and coldly utilitarian, and between the other two weapons it lay like a cold and deadly insect between two flowers.
He removed next the blue army forage cap of the ’forties and a small pottery vessel and a Mexican machete, and a long-necked oil can such as locomotive drivers use. It was of silver, and engraved upon it was the picture of a locomotive with a huge bell-shaped funnel and surrounded by an ornate wreath. Beneath it, the name “Virginia” and the date “August 9, 1873.”
He put these aside and with sudden purposefulness he removed the other objects—a frogged and braided coat of Confederate gray and a gown of sprigged muslin scented faintly of lavender and evocative of old formal minuets and drifting honeysuckle among steady candle flames—and came upon a conglomeration of yellowed papers neatly bound in packets, and at last upon a huge, brass-bound Bible. He lifted this to the edge of the chest and opened it.
The paper was brown and mellow with years, and it had a texture like that of slightly moist wood ashes, as though each page were held intact by its archaic and fading print. He turned the pages carefully back to the flyleaves. Beginning near the bottom of the final blank page a column of names and dates rose in stark and fading simplicity, growing fainter and fainter where time had lain upon them. At the top they were still legible, as they were at the foot of the preceding page.
But halfway up this page they ceased, and from there on the sheet was blank save for the faint, soft mottlings of time and an occasional brownish pen stroke.
Old Bayard sat for a long time, regarding the stark dissolving apotheosis of his name. Sartorises had derided Time, but Time was not vindictive, being longer than Sartorises. And probably unaware of them. But it was a good gesture, anyway.
“In the nineteenth century,” John Sartoris said, “genealogy is poppycock. Particularly in America, where only what a man takes and keeps has any significance and where all of us have a common ancestry and the only house from which we can claim descent with any assurance is the Old Bailey. Yet the man who professes to care nothing about his forbears is only a little less vain than the man who bases all his actions on blood precedent. And I reckon a Sartoris can have a little vanity and poppycock, if he wants it.”
Yes, it was a good gesture, and old Bayard sat and mused quietly on the tense he had unwittingly used. Was. Fatality; the augury of a man’s destiny peeping out at him from the roadside hedge, if he but recognize it, and again he ran panting through undergrowth while the fading thunder of the smoke-colored stallion swept on in the dusk and the Yankee patrol crashed behind him, crashed fainter and fainter until he crouched with spent, laboring lungs in a brier thicket and heard the pursuit rush on.
Then he crawled forth and went to a spring he knew that flowed from the roots of a beech and as he leaned down to it the final light of day was reflected on to his face, bringing into sharp relief forehead and nose above the cavernous sockets of his eyes and the panting snarl of his teeth, and from the still water there stared back at him, for a sudden moment, a skull.
The unturned corners of man’s destiny. Well, heaven, that crowded place, lay just beyond one of them, they claimed; heaven filled with every man’s illusion of himself and with the conflicting illusions of him that parade through the minds of other illusions. . . . He stirred and sighed quietly, and took out his fountain pen. At the foot of the column he wrote:
“John Sartoris. July 5, 1918.”
and beneath that:
“Caroline White Sartoris and son. October 27, 1918.”
When the ink was dry he closed the book and replaced it and took the pipe from his pocket and put it in the rosewood case with the dueling pistols and the derringer and replaced the other things and closed the chest and locked it.
Miss Jenny found old Bayard in his tilted chair in the bank door. He looked up at her with a fine assumption of surprise and his deafness seemed more pronounced than usual. But she got him up with cold implacability and led him, still grumbling, down the street where merchants and others spoke to her as to a martial queen, old Bayard stalking along beside her with sullen reluctance.
They turned presently and mounted a narrow stairway debouching between two stores, beneath an array of dingy professional signs. At the top was a dark corridor with doors, the nearest of pine, its gray paint scarred at the bottom as though it had been kicked repeatedly at the same height and with the same force.
In the door itself two holes an inch apart bore mute witness to the missing hasp, and from a staple in the jamb depended the hasp itself, fixed there by a huge, rusty lock of an ancient pattern. Bayard offered to stop here, but Miss Jenny led him firmly on to a door across the hall.
This door was freshly painted and grained to represent walnut. Into the top half of it was let a pane of thick, opaque glass bearing a name in raised gilt letters, and two embracing office hours. Miss Jenny opened this door and Bayard followed her into a small cubbyhole of a room of Spartan but suave asepsis.
The walls were an immaculate new gray, with a reproduction of a Corot and two spidery drypoints in narrow frames, and it contained a new rug in warm buff tones and a bare table and four chairs in fumed oak—all impersonal and clean and inexpensive, but revealing at a glance the proprietor’s soul; a soul hampered now by material strictures, but destined and determined someday to function amid Persian rugs and mahogany or teak, and a single irreproachable print on the chaste walls. A young woman in a starched white dress rose from a smaller table on which a telephone sat, and patted her hair.
“Good morning, Myrtle,” Miss Jenny said. “Tell Dr. Alford we’d like to see him, please.”
“You have an appointment?” the girl asked in a voice without any inflection at all.
“We’ll make one now, then,” Miss Jenny replied. “You don’t mean to say Dr. Alford don’t come to work before ten o’clock, do you?”
“Dr. Alford don’t—doesn’t see anyone without an appointment,” the girl parroted, gazing at a point above Miss Jenny’s head. “If you have no appointment, you’ll have to have an ap—”
“Tut, tut,” Miss Jenny interrupted briskly. “You run and tell Dr. Alford Colonel Sartoris wants to see him, there’s a good girl.”
“Yessum, Miss Jenny,” the girl said obediently and she crossed the room, but at the other door she paused again, and again her voice became parrot-like. “Won’t you sit down? I’ll see if the doctor is engaged.”
“You go and tell Dr. Alford we’re here,” Miss Jenny repeated affably. “Tell him I’ve got some shopping to do this morning and I haven’t got time to wait.”
“Yessum, Miss Jenny,” the girl agreed, and disappeared, and after a dignified interval she returned, once more clothed faultlessly in her professional manner. “The doctor will see you now. Come in, please.” She held the door open and stood aside.
“Thank you, honey,” Miss Jenny replied. “Is your mamma still in bed?”
“No’rn, she’s sitting up now, thank you.”
“That’s good,” Miss Jenny agreed. “Come on, Bayard.” This room was smaller than the other, and brutally carbolized. There was a white enameled cabinet filled with vicious nickel gleams, and a metal operating table and an array of electric furnaces and ovens and sterilizers. The doctor in a white linen jacket bent over a small desk, and for a while he proffered them his sleek oblivious head. Then he glanced up, and rose.
He was in the youthful indeterminate thirties, a newcomer to the town and nephew of an old resident. He had made a fine record in medical school and was of a personable exterior, but there was a sort of preoccupied dignity, a sort of erudite and cold unillusion regarding mankind, about him that precluded the easy intimacy of the small town and caused even those who remembered him as a visiting boy to address him as Doctor or Mister.
He had a small mustache and a face like a mask—a comforting face, but cold; and while old Bayard sat restively the doctor probed delicately with dry, scrubbed fingers at the wen on his face. Miss Jenny asked him a question, but he continued his exploration raptly, as though he had not heard, as though she had not even spoken; inserting a small electric bulb, which he first sterilized, into Bayard’s mouth and
