“Sure; we’re on our way home now.”
The marshal moved his head slightly and spoke to the negroes. “I reckon you boys are about ready to turn in, ain’t you?”
“Yes, suh,” the negroes answered, and they got out and lifted the viol out. Bayard gave Reno a bill and they thanked him and said good night and picked up the viol and departed quietly down a side street. The marshal turned his head again.
“Ain’t that yo’ car in front of Rogers’ café, Mitch?” he asked.
“Reckon so. That’s where I left it.”
“Well, suppose you run Hub out home, lessen he’s goin’ to stay in town tonight. Bayard better come with me.”
“Aw, hell, Buck,” Mitch protested.
“What for?” Bayard demanded.
“His folks are worried about him,” the other answered.
“They ain’t seen hide nor hair of him since that stallion throwed him. Where’s yo’ bandage, Bayard?”
“Took it off,” he answered shortly. “See here, Buck, we’re going to put Mitch out and then Hub and me are going straight home.”
“You been on yo’ way home ever since fo’ o’clock, Bayard,” the marshal replied soberly, “but you don’t seem to git no nearer there. I reckon you better come with me tonight, like yo’ aunt said.”
“Did Aunt Jenny tell you to arrest me?”
“They was worried about you, son. Miss Jenny just phoned and asked me to kind of see if you was all right until mawnin’. So I reckon we better. You ought to went on home this evenin’.”
“Aw, have a heart, Buck,” Mitch protested.
“I ruther make Bayard mad than Miss Jenny,” the other answered patiently. “You boys go on, and Bayard better come with me.”
Mitch and Hub got out and Hub lifted out his jug and they said good night and went on to where Mitch’s car stood before the restaurant.
The marshal got in beside Bayard. The jail was not far. It loomed presently above its walled court, square and implacable, its slitted upper windows brutal as saber-blows. They turned into an alley, and the marshal descended and opened a gate, and Bayard drove into the grassless and littered compound and stopped while the other went on ahead to a small garage in which stood a Ford. He backed this out and motioned Bayard forward. The garage was built to the Ford’s dimensions and about a third of Bayard’s car stuck out the door of it.
“Better’n nothin’, though,” the marshal said. “Come on.” They entered through the kitchen, into the jailkeeper’s living-quarters, and Bayard waited in a dark passage until the other found a light. Then he entered a bleak, neat room, containing spare conglomerate furnishings and a few scattered articles of masculine apparel.
“Say,” Bayard objected, “aren’t you giving me your bed?”
“Won’t need it befo’ mawnin’,” the other answered.
“You’ll be gone, then. Want me to he’p you off with yo’ clothes?”
“No. I’m all right.” Then, more graciously: “Good night, Buck. And much obliged.”
“Good night,” the marshal answered.
He closed the door behind him and Bayard removed his coat and shoes and his tie and snapped the light off and lay on the bed. Moonlight seeped into the room impalpably, refracted and sourceless; the night was without any sound. Beyond the window a, cornice rose in a succession of shallow steps against the opaline and dimensionless sky. His head was clear and cold; the whisky he had drunk was completely dead.
Or rather, it was as though his head were one Bayard who ‘lay on a strange bed and whose alcohol-dulled nerves radiated like threads of ice through that body which he must drag forever about a bleak and barren world with him. “Hell,” he said, lying on his back, staring out the window where nothing was to be seen, waiting for sleep, not knowing if it would come or not, not caring a particular damn either way. Nothing to be seen, and the long, long span of a man’s natural life. Three score and ten years to drag a stubborn body about the world and cozen its insistent demands. Three score and ten, the Bible said. Seventy years. And he was only twenty-six, not much more than a third through it. Hell.
Part Three
HORACE BENBOW IN HIS clean, wretchedly-fitting khaki which but served to accentuate his air of fine and delicate futility, and laden with an astonishing impedimenta of knapsacks and kit bags and paper-wrapped parcels, got off the two-thirty train.
Across the tight clotting of descending and ascending passengers the sound of his spoken name reached him, and he roved his distraught gaze, like a somnambulist rousing to avoid traffic, about the agglomerate faces. “Hello, hello,” he said; then he thrust himself clear and laid his bags and parcels on the edge of the platform and moved with intent haste up the train toward the baggage car.
“Horace!” his sister called again, running after him.
The station agent emerged from his office and stopped him and held him like a finely-bred restive horse and shook his hand, and thus his sister overtook him. He turned at her voice and came completely from out his distraction and swept her up in his arms until her feet were off the ground, and kissed her on the mouth.
“Dear old Narcy,” he said, kissing her again. Then he set her down and stroked his hands on her face, as a child would. “Dear old Narcy,” he repeated, touching her face with his fine spatulate hands, gazing at her as though he were drinking that constant serenity of hers through his eyes. He continued to say “Dear old Narcy,” stroking his hands on her face, utterly oblivious of his surroundings until she recalled him.
“Where in the world are you going, up this way?” Then he remembered, and released her and rushed on, she following, and stopped again at the door of the baggage car, from which the station porter and a train hand were taking trunks and boxes as the baggage clerk tilted them out. “Can’t you send down for it?” she asked. But he stood peering into the car, oblivious of her again. The two negroes returned and he stepped aside, still looking into the car with peering, birdlike motions of his head. “Let’s send back for it,” his sister said again.
“What? Oh. I’ve seen it every time I changed cars,” he told her, completely forgetting the sense of her words. “It’d be rotten luck to have it go astray right at my doorstep, wouldn’t it?” Again the negroes moved away with a trunk, and he stepped forward again and peered into the car. “That’s just about what happened to it; some clerk forgot to put it on the train at M— there it is,” he interrupted himself. “Easy now, Cap,” he called in the country idiom, in a fever of alarm as the clerk slammed into the doorway a box of foreign shape stenciled with a military address; “she’d got glass in her.”
“All right, Colonel,” the baggage clerk agreed. “We ain’t hurt her none, I reckon. If we have, all you got to do is sue us.” The two negroes backed up to the door and Horace laid his hands on the box as the clerk tilted it outward.
“Easy now, boys,” he repeated nervously, and he trotted beside them as they crossed to the platform. “Set it down easy, now. Here, sis, lend a hand, will you?”
“We got it all right, Cap’m,” the station porter said; “we ain’t gwine drop it.” But Horace continued to dab at it with his hands, and when they set it down he leaned his ear to it.
“She’s all right, ain’t she?” the station porter asked. “It’s all right,” the train porter assured him. He turned away. “Let’s go,” he called.
“I think it’s all right,” Horace agreed, his ear against the box. “I don’t hear anything. It’s packed pretty well.” The engine whistled and Horace sprang erect, and digging into his pocket he ran toward the moving cars. The porter was closing the vestibule, but he leaned down to Horace’s hand, then straightened up and touched his cap. Horace returned to his box and gave another coin to the second negro. “Put it in the house for me, careful, now,” he directed. “I’ll be back for it in a few minutes.”
“Yes, suh, Mr. Benbow. I’ll look out fer it.”
“I thought it was lost, once,” Horace confided, slipping his arm within his sister’s, and they moved toward her car. “It was delayed at Brest and didn’t come until the next boat. I had the first outfit I bought—a small one—with me, and I pretty near lost that one, too. I was blowing a small one in my cabin on the boat one day, when the whole thing, cabin and all, took fire. The captain decided that I’d better not try it again until we got ashore, what with all the men on board. The vase turned out pretty well, though,” he babbled, “lovely little thing.
I’m catching on; I really am. Venice. A voluptuous dream, a little sinister. Must take you there some day.” Then he squeezed her arm and fell to repeating “Dear old Narcy,” as though the homely sound of the nickname on his tongue was a taste he loved and had not forgotten. A few people still lingered about the station. Some of them spoke to him and he stopped to shake their hands, and a marine private with the Second Division Indian head on his shoulder, remarked the triangle on Horace’s sleeve and made a
