He was a lawyer, principally through a sense of duty to the family tradition, and though he had no particular affinity to it other than a love for printed words, for the dwelling-places of books, he contemplated returning to his musty office with a glow of . . . not eagerness, no: of deep and abiding unreluctance, almost of pleasure. The meaning of peace. Old unchanging days; unwinged perhaps, but undisastrous, too. You don’t see it, feel it, save with perspective. Fireflies had not yet come, and the cedars flowed unbroken on either hand down to the street, like a curving ebony wave with rigid unbreaking crests pointed on the sky.
Light fell outward from the window, across the porch and on a bed of cannas, hardy, bronze-like—none of your flower-like fragility, theirs; and within the room Aunt Sally’s quavering monotone.
Narcissa was there too, beside the lamp with a book, filling the room with her still and constant presence like the odor of jasmine, watching the door through which he had passed; and Horace stood on the veranda with his cold pipe, surrounded by that cool astringency of cedars like another presence. “The meaning of peace,” he said to himself once more, releasing the grave words one by one within the cool bell of silence into which he had come at last again, hearing them linger with a dying fall pure as silver and crystal struck lightly together.
“How’s Belle?” he asked on the evening of his arrival.
“They’re all right,” his sister answered. “They have a new car.”
“Dare say,” Horace agreed with detachment. “The war should certainly have accomplished that much.”
Aunt Sally had left them at last and tapped her slow bedward way. Horace stretched his serge legs luxuriously, and for a while he ceased striking matches to his stubborn pipe and sat watching his sister’s dark head bent above the magazine upon her knees, lost from lesser and inconstant things. Her hair was smoother than any reposing wings, sweeping with burnished unrebellion to a simple knot low in her neck.
“Belle’s a rotten correspondent,” he said. “Like all women.”
She turned a page, without looking up.
“Did you write to her often?”
“It’s because they realize that letters are only good to bridge intervals between actions, like the interludes in Shakespeare’s plays,” he went on, oblivious. “And did you ever know a woman who read Shakespeare without skipping the interludes? Shakespeare himself knew that, so he didn’t put any women in the interludes. Let the men bombast to one another’s echoes while the ladies are backstage washing the dinner dishes or putting the children to bed.”
“I never knew a woman that read Shakespeare at all,” Narcissa corrected. “He talks too much.”
Horace rose and stood above her and patted her dark head.
“O profundity,” he said, “you have reduced all wisdom to a phrase, and measured your sex by the stature of a star.”
“Well, they don’t,” she repeated, raising her face.
“No? Why don’t they?” He struck another match to his pipe, watching her across his cupped hands as gravely and with poised eagerness, like a striking bird. “Your Arlens and Sabatinis talk a lot, and nobody ever had more to say and more trouble saying it than old Dreiser.”
“But they have secrets,” she explained. “Shakespeare doesn’t have any secrets. He tells everything.”
“I see. Shakespeare had no sense of discrimination and no instinct for reticence. In other words, he wasn’t a gentleman,” he suggested.
“Yes. . . . That’s what I mean.”
“And so, to be a gentleman, you must have secrets.”
“Oh, you make me tired.” She returned to her magazine and he sat beside her on the couch and took her hand in his and stroked it upon his cheek and upon his wild hair.
“It’s like walking through a twilit garden,” he said. “The flowers you know are all there, in their shifts and with their hair combed out for the night, but you know all of them. So you don’t bother ’em, you just walk on and sort of stop and turn over a leaf occasionally, a leaf you hadn’t noticed before; perhaps you find a violet under it, or a bluebell or a lightning bug; perhaps only another leaf or a blade of grass. But there’s always a drop of dew on it.” He continued to stroke her hand upon his face. With her other hand she turned the magazine slowly on, listening to him with fond and serene detachment.
“Did you write to Belle often?” she repeated. “What did you say to her?”
“I wrote what she wanted to read. What all women want in letters. People are really entitled to half of what they think they should have.”
“What did you tell her?” Narcissa persisted, turning the pages slowly, her passive hand in his, following the stroking movement of his.
“I told her I was unhappy. Perhaps I was,” he added. His sister freed her hand quietly and laid it on the page. He said:
“I admire Belle. She’s so cannily stupid. Once I feared her. Perhaps . . . No, I don’t. I am immune to destruction: I have a magic. Which is a good sign that I am due for it, say the sages,” he added. “But then, acquired wisdom is a dry thing; it has a way of crumbling to dust where a sheer and blind coursing of stupid sap is impervious.” He sat without touching her, in rapt and instantaneous repose. “Not like yours, O Serene,” he said, waking again. Then he tell to saying “Dear old Narcy,” and again he took her hand. It did not withdraw; neither did it wholly surrender.
“I don’t think you ought to say I’m dull so often, Horry,” she said.
“Neither do I,” he agreed. “But I must take some sort of revenge on perfection.”
Later she lay in her dark room. Across the corridor Aunt Sally snored with placid regularity; in the adjoining room Horace lay while that wild, fantastic futility of his voyaged m lonely regions of its own beyond the moon, about meadows nailed with firmamented stars to the ultimate root of things, where unicorns filled the neighing air with galloping, or grazed or lay supine in golden-hooted repose.
Horace was seven when she was born. In the background on her sober babyhood were three beings—a lad with a wild, thin face and an unflagging aptitude for tribulation; a darkly gallant shape romantic with smuggled edibles, with strong, hard hands that smelled always of a certain thrilling carbolic soap—a being something like Omnipotence but without awesomeness; and lastly a gentle figure without legs or any inference of locomotion whatever, like a minor shrine, surrounded always by an aura of gentle melancholy and an endless and delicate manipulation of colored silken thread. This last figure was constant with gentle and melancholy unassertion; the second revolved in an orbit which bore it at regular intervals into outer space, then returned it with its strong and jolly virility into her intense world again. But the first she had made her own by a sober and maternal perseverance, and so by the time she was five or six people coerced Horace by threatening to tell Narcissa on him.
Julia Benbow died genteelly when Narcissa was seven, had been removed from their lives as a small sachet of lavender might be removed from a chest of linen, leaving a delicate lingering impalpability, and through the intense maturity of seven and eight and nine she cajoled and commanded the other two. Then Horace was in school at Sewanee and later at Oxford, from which he returned just in time to see Will Benbow Join his wife among pointed cedars and carven doves and other serene marble shapes; later Horace was separated from her again by a stupid mischancing of human affairs.
But now he lay in the adjoining room, voyaging in safe and glittering regions beyond the moon, and she lay in her dark bed, quiet, peaceful, a little too peaceful to sleep.
2
He was settled soon and easily into the routine of days between his office and his home. The musty, solemn familiarity of calf-bound and never-violated volumes, on whose dusty bindings prints of Will Benbow’s dead fingers might probably yet be found; a little tennis in the afternoons, usually on Harry Mitchell’s fine court; cards in the evenings, also with Belle and Harry as a general thing, or again and better still, with the ever-accessible and never-failing magic of printed pages, while his sister sat across the table from him or played softly to herself in the darkened room across the hall.
Occasionally men called on her; Horace received them with unfailing courtesy and a little exasperation, and departed soon to tramp about the streets or to read in bed. Dr. Alford came stiffly once or twice a week, and Horace, being somewhat of an amateur casuist, amused himself by blunting delicately feathered metaphysical darts upon the doctor’s bland scientific hide for an hour or so; it would not be until then that they realized that Narcissa had not spoken a word for sixty or seventy or eighty minutes. “That’s why they come to see you,” Horace told her—“For an emotional mud bath.”
Aunt Sally had returned home, with her bag of colored scraps and her false teeth, leaving behind her a fixed impalpability of a nebulous but definite obligation discharged at some personal sacrifice, and a faint odor of old female flesh which faded slowly from the premises, lingering yet in unexpected places so that at times Narcissa, waking and lying for a while in the darkness, in the sensuous pleasure of having Horace home again, imagined that she could
