Miss Jenny thanked her tartly for her solicitude, and dared to say that Bayard was all right: still an active member of the so-called human race, that is, since they had received no official word from the coroner. No, she had heard nothing of him since Loosh Peabody ’phoned her at four o’clock that Bayard was on his way home with a broken head. The broken head she readily believed, but the other part of the message she had put no credence in whatever, having lived with those damn Sartorises eighty years and knowing that home would be the last place in the world a Sartoris with a broken head would ever consider going. No, she was not even interested in his present whereabouts, and she hoped he hadn’t injured the horse. Horses were valuable animals.
Narcissa returned to the living room and explained to Aunt Sally whom she had been talking to and why, and drew a low chair to the lamp and took up her book.
“Well,” Aunt Sally said after a time, “if you ain’t going to talk any . . .” She fumbled her scraps together and crammed them into the bag. “I thank the Lord sometimes you and Horace ain’t any blood of mine, the way you all go on. But if you’d drink it, I don’t know who’s to get sassafras for you: I ain’t able to, and you wouldn’t know it from dog fennel or mullein, yourself.”
“I’m all right,” Narcissa protested.
“Go ahead,” Aunt Sally repeated, “get flat on your back, with me and that trifling nigger to take care of you. She ain’t wiped off a picture frame in six months, to my certain knowledge. And I’ve done everything but beg and pray.” She rose and said good night and hobbled from the room. Narcissa sat and turned the pages on, hearing the other mount the stairs with measured, laborious tappings of her stick, and for a while longer she sat and turned the pages of her book.
She turned on her light and undressed and took her book to bed, where she again held her consciousness submerged deliberately, as you hold a puppy under water until its struggles cease. And after a time her mind surrendered to the book and she read on, pausing from time to time to think warmly of sleep, reading again.
And so when the negroes first blended their instruments beneath the window she paid them only the most perfunctory notice. “Why in the world are those jelly-beans serenading me?” she thought with faint amusement, visioning immediately Aunt Sally in her nightcap leaning from a window and shouting them away. And she lay with the book open, seeing upon the spread page the picture she had created while the plaintive rhythm of the strings and clarinet drifted into the open window.
Then she sat bolt upright, with a sharp and utter certainty, and clapped the book shut and slipped from bed. From the adjoining room she looked down.
The negroes were grouped on the lawn; the frosted clarinet, the guitar, the sober, comical bulk of the bass fiddle. At the street entrance to the drive a motorcar stood in shadow. The musicians played once; then a voice called from the car, and they retreated across the lawn and the car moved away, without lights. She was certain, then: no one else would play one tune beneath a lady’s window, just enough to waken her from sleep, then go away.
She returned to her room. The book lay face down upon the bed, but she went to the window and stood there, between the parted curtains, looking out upon the black-and-silver world and the peaceful night. The air moved upon her face and amid the dark, fallen wings of her hair with grave coolness. “The beast, the beast,” she whispered to herself. She let the curtains fall and on her silent feet she descended the stairs again and found the telephone in the darkness, muffling its bell when she rang.
Miss Jenny’s voice came out of the night with its usual brisk and cold asperity, and without surprise or curiosity. No, he had not returned home, for he was by now safely locked up in jail, she believed, unless the city officers were too corrupt to obey a lady’s request. Serenading? Fiddle sticks. What would he want to go serenading for? He couldn’t injure himself serenading, unless someone killed him with a flatiron or an alarm clock. And why was she concerned about him?
Narcissa hung up, and for a moment she stood in the darkness, beating her fists on the telephone’s unresponsive box. The beast, the beast.
She received three callers that night. One came formally; the second came informally; the third came anonymously.
The garage which sheltered her car was a small brick building surrounded by evergreens. One side of it was a continuat’ion of the garden wall. Beyond the wall a grass-grown lane led back to another street. The garage was about fifteen yards from the house and its roof rose to the level of the first-floor windows. Narcissa’s bedroom windows looked out upon the slate roof of it.
This third caller entered by the lane and mounted on to the wall and thence to the garage roof, where he now lay in the shadow of a cedar, sheltered so from the moon. He had lain there for a long time. The room facing him was dark when he arrived, but he had lain in his fastness quiet as an animal and with an animal’s patience, without movement save to occasionally raise his head and reconnoiter the immediate scene with covert dartings of his eyes.
But the room facing him remained dark while an hour passed. In the meantime a car entered the drive (he recognized it; he knew every car in town) and a man entered the house. The second hour passed and the room was still dark, and the car stood yet in the drive. Then the man emerged and drove away, and a moment later the lights downstairs went out, and then the window facing him glowed, and through the sheer curtains he saw her moving about the room, watched the shadowy motions of her disrobing.
Then she passed out of his vision. But the light still burned and he lay with still and infinite patience; lay so while another hour passed and another car stopped before the house and three men carrying an awkwardly-shaped burden came up the drive and stood in the moonlight beneath the window; lay so until they played once and went away. When they had gone, she came to the window and parted the curtains and stood for a while in the dark fallen wings of her hair, looking directly into his hidden eyes.
Then the curtains fell again, and once more she was a shadowy movement beyond them. Then the light went off, and he lay face downward upon the steep pitch of the roof, utterly motionless for a long time, darting from beneath his hidden face covert, ceaseless glances, quick and darting, all-embracing as those of an animal.
To Narcissa’s home they came finally. They had visited the dark homes of all the other unmarried girls one by one and sat in the car while the negroes stood on the lawn with their blended instruments. Heads had appeared at darkened windows, sometimes lights went up; once they were invited in, but Hub and Mitch hung diffidently back; once refreshment was sent out to them; once they were heartily cursed by a young man who happened to be sitting with the young lady on the dark veranda. In the meantime they had lost the breather-cap, and as they moved from house to house, all six of them drank fraternally from the jug, turn and turn about. At last they reached the Benbow’s and played once beneath the cedars. There was a light yet in one window, but none came to it.
The moon stood well down the sky. Its light was now a cold silver on things, spent and a little wearied, and the world was empty as they rolled without lights along a street lifeless and fixed in black and silver as any street in the moon itself. Beneath stippled intermittent shadows they went, passed quiet intersections dissolving away, occasionally a car motionless at the curb before a house. A dog crossed the street ahead of them trotting, and went on across a lawn and so from sight, but saving this there was no movement anywhere.
The square opened spaciously about the absinthe-cloudy mass of elms that surrounded the courthouse. Among them the round spaced globes were more like huge, pallid grapes than ever. Above the exposed vault in each bank burned a single bulb; inside the hotel lobby, before which a row of cars was aligned, another burned. Other lights there were none.
They circled the courthouse, and a shadow moved near the hotel door and detached itself from shadow and came to the curb, a white shirt glinting within a spread coat; and as the car swung slowly toward another street, the man hailed them. Bayard stopped and the man came through the blanched dust and laid his hand on the door.
“Hi, Buck,” Mitch said. “You’re up pretty late, ain’t you?”
The man had a sober, good-natured horse’s face. He wore a metal star on his unbuttoned waistcoat. His coat humped slightly over his hip. “What you boys doin’?” he asked. “Been to a dance?”
“Serenading,” Bayard answered. “Want a drink, Buck?”
“No, much obliged.” He stood with his hand on the door, gravely and good-naturedly serious. “Ain’t you fellers out kind of late, yo’selves?”
“It is
