“Howdy, buddy,” Horace said, turning upon him his shy startled gaze.
“Evenin’, General,” the marine answered. He spat, not exactly at Horace’s feet, and not exactly anywhere else. Narcissa clasped her brother’s arm against her side.
“Do come on home and get into some decent clothes,” she said in a lower tone, hurrying him along.
“Get out of uniform?” he said. “I rather fancied myself in khaki,” he added, a little hurt. “You really think I am ridiculous in this?”
“Of course not,” she answered immediately, squeezing his hand. “Of course not. I’m sorry I said that. You wear your uniform just as long as you want to.”
“It’s a good uniform,” he said soberly. “I don’t mean this,” he said, gesturing toward the symbol on his arm. They went on. “People will realize that in about ten years, when noncombatants’ hysteria has worn itself out and the individual soldiers realize that the A.E.F. didn’t invent disillusion.”
“What did it invent?” she asked, holding his arm against her, surrounding him with the fond, inattentive serenity of her affection.
“God knows. . . . Dear old Narcy,” he said again, and they crossed the platform toward her car. “So you have dulled your palate for khaki.”
“Of course not,” she repeated, shaking his arm a little as she released it. “You wear it just as long as you want to.” She opened the car door. Someone called after them and they looked back and saw the porter trotting after them with Horace’s hand-luggage, which he had walked off and left lying on the platform.
“Oh, Lord,” he exclaimed, “I worry with it for four thousand miles, then lose it on my own doorstep. Much obliged, Sol.” The porter stowed the things in the car. “That’s the first outfit I got,” Horace added to his sister, “and the vase I blew on shipboard. I’ll show it to you when we get home.”
His sister got in under the wheel. “Where are your clothes? In the box?”
“Haven’t any. Had to throw most of ’em away to make room for the other things. No room for anything else.” Narcissa sat and looked at him for a moment with fond exasperation. “What’s the matter?” he asked innocently. “Forgot something yourself?”
“No. Get in. Aunt Sally’s waiting to see you.”
They drove on and mounted the shady gradual hill toward the square, and Horace looked about happily on familiar scenes. Sidings with freight cars; the platform which in the fall would be laden with cotton bales in serried rotund ranks; the town power plant, a brick building from which there came a steady, unbroken humming and about which in the spring gnarled heaven trees swung ragged lilac bloom against the harsh ocher and Indian red of a clay cut-bank. Then a street of lesser residences, mostly new.
Same tight little houses with a minimum of lawn, homes built by country-bred people and set close to the street after the country fashion; occasionally a house going up on a lot which had been vacant sixteen months ago when he went away. Then other streets opened away beneath arcades of green, shadier, with houses a little older and more imposing as they got away from the station’s vicinity: and pedestrians, usually dawdling negro boys at this hour or old men bound townward after their naps, to spend the afternoon in sober, futile absorptions.
The hill flattened away into the plateau on which the town proper had been built these hundred years and more ago, and the street became definitely urban presently with garages and small shops with merchants in shirt sleeves, and customers; the picture show With its lobby plastered with life episodic in colored lithographed mutations.
Then the square, with its unbroken low skyline of old weathered brick and fading dead names stubborn yet beneath scaling paint, and drifting negroes in casual and careless O.D. garments worn by both sexes, and country people in occasional khaki too; and the brisker urbanites weaving among their placid chewing unhaste and among the men in tilted chairs before the stores.
The courthouse was of brick too, with stone arches rising amid elms, and among the trees the monument of the Confederate soldier stood, his musket at order arms, shading his carven eyes with his stone hand. Beneath the porticoes of the courthouse and on benches about the green, the city fathers sat and talked and drowsed, in uniform too, here and there. But it was the gray of Old Jack and Beauregard and Joe Johnston, and they sat in a grave sedateness of minor political sinecures, smoking and spitting, about checkerboards. When the weather was bad they moved inside to the circuit clerk’s office.
It was here that the young men loafed also, pitching dollars or tossing baseballs back and forth or lying on the grass until the young girls in their little colored dresses and cheap nostalgic perfume should come trooping down town through the late afternoon, to the drugstore. When the weather was bad these young men loafed in the drug stores or in the barber shop.
“Lots of uniforms yet,” Horace remarked. “All be home by June. Have the Sartoris boys come home yet?”
“John is dead,” his sister answered. “Didn’t you know?”
“No,” he answered quickly, with swift concern. “Poor old Bayard. Rotten luck they have. Funny family. Always going to wars, and always getting killed. And young Bayard’s wife died, you wrote me.”
“Yes. But he’s here. He’s got a racing automobile and he spends all his time tearing around the country in it. We are expecting every day to hear he’s killed himself in it.”
“Poor devil,” Horace said, and again: “Poor old Colonel. He used to hate an automobile like a snake. Wonder what he thinks about it.”
“He goes with him.”
“What? Old Bayard in a motorcar?”
“Yes. Miss Jenny says it’s to keep Bayard from turning it over. But she says Colonel Sartoris doesn’t know it, but that Bayard would just as soon break both their necks; that he probably will before he’s done.” She drove on across the square, among tethered wagons, and cars parked casually and without order. “I hate Bayard Sartoris,” she said with sudden vehemence; “I hate all men.” Horace looked at her quickly.
“What’s the matter? What’s Bayard done to you? No, that’s backward: what have you done to Bayard?” But she didn’t answer. She turned into another street bordered by negro stores of one story and shaded by metal awnings beneath which negroes lounged, skinning bananas or small florid cartons of sweet biscuits; and then a grist mill driven by a spasmodic gasoline engine.
It oozed chaff and a sifting dust, motelike in the sun, and above the door a tediously hand-lettered sign: W. C. BEARDS MILL. Between it and a shuttered and silent gin draped with feathery soiled festoons of lint, an anvil clanged at the end of a short lane filled with wagons and horses and mules and shaded by mulberry trees beneath which countrymen in overalls squatted.
“He ought to have more consideration for the old fellow than that,” Horace said fretfully.
“Still, they’ve just gone through with an experience that pretty well shook the verities and the humanities, and whether they know it or not, they’ve got another one ahead of ’em that’ll pretty well finish the business. Give him a little time. . . . But personally I can’t see why he shouldn’t be allowed to kill himself, if that’s what he thinks he thinks he wants. Sorry for Miss Jenny, though.”
“Yes,” his sister agreed, quietly again. “They’re worried about Colonel Sartoris’ heart, too. Everybody is except him and Bayard, that is. I’m glad I have you instead of one of those Sartorises, Horry.” She laid her hand quickly and lightly on his thin knee.
“Dear old Narcy,” he said. Then his face clouded again. “Damn scoundrel,” he said. “Well, it’s their trouble. How’s Aunt Sally been?”
“All right.” And then: “I am glad you’re home, Horry.” The shabby small shops were behind and now the street opened away between old shady lawns, spacious and quiet. These homes were quite old, in appearance at least, and set well back from the street and its dust, they emanated a gracious and benign peace, steadfast as a windless afternoon in a world without motion or sound. Horace looked about him and drew a long breath.
“Perhaps this is the reason for wars,” he said. “The meaning of peace.”
They turned into an intersecting street, narrower but more shady and even quieter, with a golden Arcadian drowse, and turned through a gate in a honey-suckle-covered fence of iron pickets. From the gate the cinder-packed drive rose in a grave curve between cedars.
The cedars had been set out by an English architect of the ’40’s, who had built the house (with the minor concession of a veranda) in the funereal light Tudor which the young Victoria had sanctioned; and beneath and among them, even on the brightest days, lay a resinous exhilarating gloom. Mockingbirds loved them, and catbirds, and thrushes demurely mellifluous in the late afternoon; but the grass beneath them was sparse or nonexistent, and there were no insects save fireflies in the dusk.
The drive ascended to the house and curved before it and descended again to the street in an unbroken arc of cedars. Within the arc rose a lone oak, broad and huge and low; around its trunk ran a wooden bench. About this half-moon of lawn and without the arc of the drive were bridal wreath and crape myrtle bushes old as time and huge as age would make them. Big as trees they were, and in one fence corner was an astonishing dump of stunted
