But the wastebasket beside the desk and the desk itself and the mantel above the trash-filled fireplace, and the window ledges too, were cluttered with circular mail matter and mail order catalogues and government bulletins of all kinds.
In one corner, on an up-ended packing box, sat a water cooler of stained oxidized glass, in another corner leaned a clump of cane fishing poles warping slowly of their own weight; and on every horizontal surface rested a collection of objects not to be found outside of a second-hand store—old garments, bottles, a kerosene lamp, a wooden box of tins of axle grease, lacking one; a clock in the shape of a bland china morning glory supported by four garlanded maidens who had Suffered sundry astonishing anatomical mishaps, and here and there among the dusty indiscrimination, various instruments pertaining to the occupant’s profession.
It was one of these that Dr. Peabody sought now in the littered desk on which sat a single photograph in a wooden frame, and though Miss Jenny said again, “You, Loosh Peabody, you listen to me,” he continued to seek it with bland and unhurried equanimity.
“You fasten your clothes and we’ll go back to that doctor,” Miss Jenny ordered her nephew. “Neither you nor I can waste any more time with a doddering old fool.”
“Sit down, Jenny,” Dr. Peabody repeated, and he drew out a drawer and removed from it a box of cigars and a handful of faded artificial trout flies and a soiled collar, and lastly a stethoscope; then he tumbled the other things back into the drawer and shut it with his knee.
Miss Jenny sat trim and outraged, fuming while he listened to old Bayard’s heart.
“Well,” she snapped, “does it tell you how to take that wart off his face? Will Falls didn’t need any telephone to find that out.”
“It tells more than that,” Dr. Peabody answered. “It tells how Bayard’ll get rid of all his troubles, if he keeps on riding in that hellion’s automobile.”
“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said, “Bayard’s a good driver. I never rode with a better one.”
“It’ll take more’n a good driver to keep this—” he tapped Bayard’s chest with his blunt finger—“goin’, time that boy whirls that thing around another curve or two like I’ve seen him do.”
“Did you ever hear of a Sartoris dying from a natural cause, like anybody else?” Miss Jenny demanded. “Don’t you know that heart ain’t going to take Bayard off before his time? You get up from there, and come on with me,” she added to her nephew. Bayard buttoned his shirt. Dr. Peabody sat on the sofa and watched him quietly.
“Bayard,” he said suddenly, “why don’t you stay out of that damn thing?”
“What?”
“If you don’t stay out of that car, you ain’t gain’ to need me nor Will Falls, nor that boy in yonder with all his hand-boiled razors, neither.”
“What business is it of yours?” old Bayard demanded.
“By God, can’t I break my neck in peace if I want to?” He rose. He was trembling, fumbling at his waistcoat buttons, and Miss Jenny rose also and made to help him, but he put her roughly aside. Dr. Peabody sat quietly, thumping his fat fingers on one fat knee. “I have already outlived my time,” old Bayard continued more mildly. “I am the first of my name to see sixty years that I know of. I reckon Old Marster is keeping me for a reliable witness to the extinction of it.”
“Now,” Miss Jenny said icily, “you’ve made your speech, and Loosh Peabody has wasted the morning for you, so I reckon we can leave now and let Loosh go out and doctor mules for a while, and you can sit around the rest of the day, being a Sartoris and feeling sorry for yourself. Good morning, Loosh.”
“Make him let that place alone, Jenny,” Dr. Peabody said.
“Ain’t you and Will Falls going to cure it for him?”
“You keep him from letting Will Falls put anything on it,” Dr. Peabody repeated equably. “It’s all right. Just leave it alone.”
“We’re going to a doctor, that’s what we’re going to do,” Miss Jenny replied. “Come on here.”
When the door had closed, he sat motionless and heard them quarreling beyond it. Then the sound of their voices moved on down the corridor toward the stairs, and still quarreling loudly and, on old Bayard’s part, with profane emphasis, the voices died away. Then Dr. Peabody lay back on the sofa shaped already to the bulk of him, and with random deliberation he reached a nickel thriller blindly from the stack at the head of the couch.
4
As they neared the bank Narcissa Benbow came along from the opposite direction, and they met at the door, where he made her a ponderous compliment on her appearance while she stood in her pale dress and shouted her grave voice into his deafness. Then he took his tilted chair, and Miss Jenny followed her into the bank and to the teller’s window. There was no one behind the grille at the moment save the bookkeeper. He looked at them briefly and covertly across his shoulder, then slid from his stool and crossed to the window, but without raising his eyes again.
He took Narcissa’s check, and while she listened to Miss Jenny’s recapitulation of Bayard’s and Loosh Peabody’s stubborn masculine stupidity she remarked the reddish hair which clothed his arms down to the second joints of his fingers, and remarked with a faint yet distinct distaste, and a little curiosity since it was not particularly warm, the fact that his hands and arms were beaded with perspiration.
Then she made her eyes blank again and took the notes which he pushed under the grille to her and opened her bag. From its blue satin maw the corner of an envelope and some of its superscription peeped suddenly, but she crumpled it quickly from sight and put the money in and closed the bag.
They turned away, Miss Jenny still talking, and she paused at the door again, clothed in her still aura of quietness, while old Bayard twitted her heavily on imaginary affairs of the heart which furnished the sole theme of conversation between them, shouting serenely at him in return. Then she went on, surrounded by tranquillity like a visible presence or an odor or a sound.
As long as she was in sight the bookkeeper stood at the window. His head was bent and his hand made a series of neat, meaningless figures on the pad beneath it. Then she went on and passed from sight. He moved, and in doing so he found that the pad had adhered to his damp wrist, so that when he moved his arm it came also. Then its own weight freed it and it fell to the floor.
After the bank closed that afternoon Snopes crossed the square and entered a street and approached a square frame building with a double veranda, from which the mournful cacophony of a cheap talking-machine came upon the afternoon. He entered. The music came from the room to the right and as he passed the door he saw a man in a collarless shirt sitting in a chair with his sock feet on another chair, smoking a pipe, the evil reek of which followed him down the hall.
The hall smelled of damp, harsh soap, and the linoleum carpet gleamed, still wet. He followed it and approached a sound of steady, savage activity, and came upon a woman in a shapeless gray garment, who ceased mopping and looked at him across her gray shoulder, sweeping her lank hair from her brow with a reddened forearm.
“Evenin’, Miz Beard,” Snopes said. “Virgil come home yet?”
“He was through here a minute ago,” she answered.
“If he ain’t out front, I reckon his paw sent him on a arr’nd, Mr. Beard’s takin’ one of his spells in the hip agin. He might ’a’ sent Virgil on a arr’nd.” Her hair fell lankly across her face again. Again she brushed it aside with a harsh gesture. “You got some mo’ work fer him?”
“Yessum. You don’t know which-a-way he went?”
“Ef Mr. Beard ain’t sont him nowheres he mought be in the back yard. He don’t usually go fur away.” Again she dragged her lank hair aside; shaped so long to labor, her muscles were restive under inaction. She grasped the mop again.
Snopes went on and stood on the kitchen steps above an enclosed space barren of grass and containing a chicken pen, also grassless, in which a few fowls huddled or moved about in forlorn distraction in the dust. On one hand was a small kitchen garden of orderly, tended rows. In the corner of the yard was an outhouse of some sort, of weathered boards.
“Virgil,” he said. The yard was desolate with ghosts; ghosts of discouraged weeds, of food in the shape of empty tins, broken boxes and barrels; a pile of stove wood and a chopping block across which lay an ax whose helve had been mended with rusty wire amateurishly wound. He descended the steps and the chickens raised a discordant clamor, anticipating food.
“Virgil.”
Sparrows found sustenance of some sort in the dust among the fowls, but ‘the fowls themselves, perhaps with a foreknowledge of frustration and of doom, huddled back and forth along the wire, discordant and distracted, watching him with
