About the oak and from the funereal scimitar of the drive descending, lawn flowed streetward with good sward broken by random clumps of jonquils and narcissi and gladioli. Originally the lawn was in terraces and the flowers a formal bed on the first terrace.
Then Will Benbow, Horace’s and Narcissa’s father, had had the terraces obliterated. It was done with plows and scrapers and seeded anew with grass, and he had supposed the flower bed destroyed. But the next spring the scattered bulbs sprouted again, and now every year the lawn was stippled with bloom in yellow, white, and pink without order. A certain few young girls asked and received permission to pick some of them each spring, and neighbors’ children played quietly among them and beneath the cedars.
At the top of the drive, where it curved away descending again, sat the brick doll’s house in which Horace and Narcissa lived, surrounded always by that cool, faintly astringent odor at cedar trees.
It was trimmed with white and it had mullioned casements brought out from England; along the veranda eaves and above the door grew a wistaria vine like heavy tarred rope and thicker than a man’s wrist. The lower casements stood open on gently billowing curtains: on the sill you expected to see a scrubbed wooden bowl, or at least an immaculate and supercilious cat. But the window sill held only a wicker work basket from which, like a drooping poinsettia, spilled an end at patchwork in crimson and white; and in the doorway Aunt Sally, a potty little woman in a lace cap, leaned on a gold-headed ebony walking stick.
Just as it should be, and Horace turned and looked back at his sister crossing the drive with the parcels he had forgotten again.
He banged and splashed happily in his bathroom, shouting through the door to his sister where she sat on his bed. His discarded khaki lay on a chair, holding yet through long association, in its harsh drab folds, something at that taut and delicate futility of his. On the marble-topped dresser lay the crucible and tubes at his glass-blowing outfit, the first one he had bought, and beside it the vase he had blown on shipboard—a small chaste shape in clear glass, not four inches tall, fragile as a silver lily and incomplete.
“They work in caves,” he was shouting through the door, “down flights of stairs underground. You feel water seeping under your foot while you’re reaching for the next step; and when you put your hand out to steady yourself against the wall, it’s wet when you take it away. It feels just like blood.”
“Horace!”
“Yes, magnificent. And ’way ahead you see the glow. All of a sudden the tunnel comes glimmering out of nothing; then you see the furnace, with things rising and falling before it, shutting off the light, and the walls go glimmering again. At first they’re just shapeless things hunching about. Antic, with shadows on the bloody walls, red shadows. A glare, and black shapes like paper dolls weaving and rising and falling in front of it, like a magic-lantern shutter. And then a face comes out, blowing, and other faces sort of swell out of the red dark like painted balloons.
“And the things themselves. Sheerly and tragically beautiful. Like preserved flowers, you know. Macabre and inviolate; purged and purified as bronze, yet fragile as soap bubbles. Sounds of pipes crystallized. Flutes and oboes, but mostly reeds. Oaten reeds. Damn it, they bloom like flowers right before your eyes.
Midsummer Night’s Dream to a salamander.” His voice became unintelligible, soaring into measured phrases which she did not recognize, but which from the pitch of his voice she knew to be Milton’s archangels in their sonorous plunging ruin.
He emerged at last, in a white shirt and serge trousers, but still borne aloft on his flaming verbal wings, and while his voice chanted in measured syllables she fetched a pair of shoes from the closet, and while she stood holding the shoes in her hands he ceased chanting and touched her face again with his hands after that fashion of a child.
At supper Aunt Sally broke into his staccato babbling: “Did you bring your Snopes back with you?” she asked. This Snopes was a young man, member of a seemingly inexhaustible family which for the last ten years had been moving to town in driblets from a small settlement known as Frenchman’s Bend.
Flem, the first Snopes, had appeared unheralded one day behind the counter of a small restaurant on a side street, patronized by country folk. With this foothold and like Abraham of old, he brought his blood and legal kin household by household, individual by individual, into town, and established them where they could gain money.
Flem himself was presently manage’ of the city light and wale, plant, and for the following few years he was a sort of handy man to the municipal government; and three years ago, to old Bayard’s profane astonishment and unconcealed annoyance, be became vice president of the Sartoris bank, where already a relation of his was a bookkeeper.
He still retained the restaurant, and the canvas tent in the rear of it, in which he and his wife and baby had passed the first few months of their residence in town; and it served as an alighting-place for incoming Snopeses, from which they spread to small third-rate businesses of various kinds-grocery stores, barbershops (there was one, an invalid of some sort, who operated a second-hand peanut roaster) where they multiplied and flourished. The older residents from their Jeffersonian houses and genteel stores and offices, looked on with amusement at first. But this was long since become something like consternation.
The Snopes to which Aunt Sally referred was named Montgomery Ward, and just before the draft law went into operation in ’17 he applied to a recruiting officer in Memphis and was turned down for military service because of his heart. Later, to everyone’s surprise, particularly that of Horace Benbow’s friends, he departed with Horace to a position in the Y.M.C.A. Later still, it was told of him that he had traveled all the way to Memphis on that day when he had offered for service, with a plug of chewing tobacco beneath his left armpit. But he and his patron were already departed when that story got out.
“Did you bring your Snopes back with you?” Aunt Sally asked.
“No,” he answered, and his thin, nerve-sick face clouded over with a fine cold distaste. “I was very much disappointed in him. I don’t even care to talk about it.”
“Anybody could have told you that when you left.”
Aunt Sally chewed slowly and steadily above her plate. Horace brooded for a moment; his thin hand tightened slowly upon his fork.
“It’s individuals like that, parasites—” he began, but his sister interrupted.
“Who cares about an old Snopes, anyway? Besides, it’s too late at night to talk about the horrors of war.”
Aunt Sally made a moist sound through her food, a sound of vindicated superiority.
“It’s the generals they have nowadays,” she said. “General Johnston or General Forrest wouldn’t have took a Snopes in his army at all.” Aunt Sally was no relation whatever. She lived next door but one with two maiden sisters, one younger and one older than she. She had been in and out of the house ever since Horace and Narcissa could remember, having arrogated to herself certain rights in their lives before they could walk: privileges which were never definitely expressed and of which she never availed herself, yet the mutual admission of whose existence she never permitted to tall into abeyance.
She would walk into any room in the house unannounced, and she liked to talk tediously and a little tactlesslv of Horace’s and Narcissa’s infantile ailments. It was said that she had once “made eyes” at Will Benbow, although she was a woman of thirty-four or -five when Will married; and she still spoke of him with a taintly disparaging possessrveness, and of his wite she always spoke pleasantly too. “Julia was a right sweet-natured girl,” she would say.
So when Horace went off to the war Aunt Sally moved over to keep Narcissa company; no other arrangement had ever occurred to any of the three of them; the fact that Narcissa must have Aunt Sally in the house for an indefinite year or two or three appeared as unavoidable as the fact that Horace must go to the war. Aunt Sally was a good old soul, but she lived much in the past, shutting her mind with a bland finality to anything which had occurred since 1901.
For her, time had gone out drawn by horses, and into her stubborn and placid vacuum the squealing of automobile brakes had never penetrated. She had a lot of the crudities which old people are entitled to. She liked the sound of her own voice and she didn’t like to be alone at any time, and as she had never got accustomed to the false teeth which she had bought twelve years ago and so never touched them other than to change weekly the water in which they reposed, she ate un prettily of unprepossessing but easily malleable toads.
Narcissa reached her hand beneath the table and touched her brother’s knee again. “I am glad you’re home, Horry.”
He looked at her quickly, and the cloud faded from his face as suddenly as it had come, and his spirit slipped, like a swimmer into a tideless
