“You ought not to done that,” Mitch told him.
“Ah, let him take it off if he wants.” Hub said. “He’s all right.” He got in and stowed the jug away between his knees, and Bayard turned the car about. The sandy road hissed beneath the broad tires of it and rose shaling into the woods again where the dappled moonlight was intermittent, treacherous with dissolving vistas. Invisible and sourceless among the shifting patterns of light and shade, whippoorwills were like flutes tongued liquidly. The road passed out of the woods and descended, with sand in shifting and silent lurches, and they turned on to the valley road and away from town.
The car went on, on the dry hissing of the closed muffler. The negroes murmured among themselves with mellow snatches of laughter whipped like scraps of torn paper away behind. They passed the iron gates and Bayard’s home serenely in the moonlight among its trees, and the silent, box-like flag station and the metal-roofed cotton gin on the railroad siding.
The road rose at last into hills. It was smooth and empty and winding, and the negroes fell silent as Bayard increased speed. But still it was not anything like what they had anticipated of him. Twice more they stopped and drank, and then from an ultimate hilltop they looked down upon another cluster of lights like a clotting of beads upon the pale gash where the railroad ran. Hub produced the breather-cap and they drank again.
Through streets identical with those at home they moved slowly, toward an identical square. People on the square turned and looked curiously after them. They crossed the square and followed another street and went on between broad lawns and shaded windows, and presently beyond an iron fence and well back among black-and-silver trees, lighted windows hung in ordered tiers like rectangular lanterns strung among the branches.
They stopped here, in shadow. The negroes descended and lifted the bass viol out, and a guitar. The third one held a slender tube frosted over with keys upon which the intermittent moon glinted in pale points, and they stood with their heads together, murmuring among themselves and touching plaintive muted chords from the strings. Then the one with the clarinet raised it to his lips.
The tunes were old tunes. Some of them were sophisticated tunes and formally intricate, but in the rendition this was lost, and all of them were imbued instead with a plaintive similarity, a slurred and rhythmic simplicity; and they drifted in rich, plaintive chords upon the silver air, fading, dying in minor reiterations along the treacherous vistas of the moon. They played again, an old waltz. The college Cerberus came across the dappled lawn to the fence and leaned his arms upon it, a lumped listening shadow among other shadows. Across the street, in the shadows there, other listeners stood. A car approached and slowed to the curb and shut off engine and lights, and in the tiered windows heads leaned, aureoled against the lighted rooms behind, without individuality, feminine, distant, delicately and divinely young.
They played “Home, Sweet Home,” and when the rich minor died away, across to them came a soft clapping of slender palms. Then Mitch sang “Good Night, Ladies” in his true, over-sweet tenor, and the young hands were more importunate, and as they drove away the slender heads leaned aureoled with bright hair in the lighted windows and the soft clapping drifted after them for a long while, fainter and fainter in the silver silence and the moon’s infinitude.
At the top of the first hill out of town they stopped and Hub removed the breather-cap. Behind them random lights shone among the trees, and it was as though there still came to them across the hushed world that sound of young palms like flung delicate flowers before their masculinity and their youth, and they drank without speaking, lapped still in the fading magic of that lost moment. Mitch sang to himself softly; the car slid purring on again. The road dropped curving smoothly, empty and blanched. Bayard spoke, his voice harsh, abrupt.
“Cut-out, Hub,” he said. Hub bent forward and reached his hand under the dash, and the car swept on with a steady, leashed muttering like waking thunderous wings; then the road flattened in a long swoop toward another rise and the muttering leaped to crescendo and the car shot forward with neck-snapping violence. The negroes had stopped talking; one of them raised a wailing shout.
“Reno lost his hat,” Hub said, looking back.
“He don’t need it,” Bayard replied. The car roared up this hill and rushed across the crest of it and flashed around a tight curve.
“Oh, Lawd,” the negro wailed. “Mr. Bayard!” The air-blast stripped his words away like leaves. “Lemme out, Mr. Bayard!”
“Jump out, then,” Bayard answered. The road fell from beneath them like a tilting floor, and away across a valley, straight now as a string. The negroes clutched their instruments and held to one another. The speedometer showed fifty-five and sixty and turned gradually on. Sparse houses flashed slumbering away, and fields and patches of woodland like tunnels.
The road went on across the black and silver land. Whippoorwills called on either side, one to another inquiring, liquid reiterations; now and then as the headlights swept in the road’s abrupt windings, two spots of pale fire blinked in the dust before them as the bird blundered awkwardly somewhere beneath the radiator. The ridge rose steadily, with wooded slopes falling away on either hand. Sparse negro cabins squatted on the slopes or beside the road.
The road dipped, then rose again in a long slant broken by another dip; then it stood directly before them like a wall. The car shot upward and over the dip and left the road completely, then swooped dreadfully on, and the negroes’ concerted wail whipped forlornly away. Then the ridge attained its crest and the car’s thunder ceased and it rolled to a stop. The negroes now sat in the bottom of the tonneau.
“Is dis heaven?” one murmured after a time.
“Dey wouldn’t let you in heaven, wid likker on yo’ breaf and no hat, feller,” another said.
“Ef de Lawd don’t take no better keer of me dan He done of dat hat, I don’t wanter go dar, noways,” the first rejoined.
“Mmmmmmm,” the second agreed, “when us come down dat ’ere las’ hill, dis yere cla’inet almos’ blowed clean outen my han’, let ’lone my hat.”
“And when us jumped over dat ’ere lawg er whutever it wuz back dar,” the third one added, “I thought fer a minute dis whole auto’bile done blowed outen my han’.”
They drank again. It was high here, and the air moved with grave coolness. On either hand lay a valley filled with silver mist and with whippoorwills; beyond these valleys the silver earth rolled on into the sky. Across it, mournful and far, a dog howled. Bayard’s head was as cool and clear as a clapperless bell. Within it that face emerged clearly at last: those two eyes round with grave astonishment, winged serenely by two dark wings of hair. It was that Benbow girl, he said to himself, and he sat for a while, gazing into the sky. The lights on the town clock were steadfast and yellow and unwinking in the dissolving distance, but in all other directions the world rolled away m slumbrous ridges, milkily opaline.
Her appetite was gone at supper, and Aunt Sally Wyatt mouthed her soft prepared food and mumbled querulously at her because she wouldn’t eat.
“My mother saw to it that I drank a good cup of bark tea when I come sulking to the table and wouldn’t eat,” Aunt Sally stated, “but folks nowadays think the good Lord’s going to keep ’em well and them lifting no finger.”
“I’m all right,” Narcissa insisted. “I just don’t want any supper.”
“That’s what you say. Let yourself get down, and Lord knows, I ain’t strong enough to wait on you. In my day young folks had more consideration for their elders.” She mouthed her food unprettily, querulously and monotonously retrospective, while Narcissa toyed restively with the food she could not eat.
Later Aunt Sally continued her monologue while she rocked with her interminable fancywork on her lap. She would never divulge what it was to be when completed, nor for whom, and she had been working on it for fifteen years, carrying about with her a shapeless bag of dingy, threadbare brocade containing odds and ends of colored fabric in all possible shapes.
She could never bring herself to trim them to any pattern; so she shifted and fitted and mused and fitted and shifted them like pieces of a patient puzzle-picture, trying to fit them to a pattern or create a pattern about them without using her scissors; smoothing her colored scraps with flaccid, putty-colored fingers, shifting and shifting them. From the bosom of her dress the needle Narcissa had threaded for her dangled its spidery skein.
Across the room Narcissa sat with a book. Aunt Sally’s voice droned on with querulous interminability while Narcissa read. Suddenly she rose and laid the book down and crossed the room and entered the alcove where her piano sat. But she had not played four bars before her hands crashed in discord, and she shut the piano and went to the
