At times it would be so distinct that she would pause suddenly and speak Aunt Sally’s name into an empty room. And sometimes Aunt Sally replied, having availed herself again of her prerogative of coming in at any hour the notion took her, unannounced, to see how they were getting along and to complain querulously of her own household. She was old, too old to react easily to change, and it was hard for her to readjust herself to her sisters’ ways again after her long sojourn in a household where everyone gave in to her regarding all domestic affairs.
At home her elder sister ran things in a capable, shrewish fashion; she and the third sister persisted in treating Aunt Sally like the child she had been sixty-five years ago, whose diet and clothing and hours must be rigorously and pettishly supervised.
“I can’t even go to the bathroom in peace,” she complained querulously. “I’m a good mind to pack up and move back over here and let ’em get along the best they can.” She rocked fretfully in the chair which by unspoken agreement was never disputed her, looking about the room with bleared, protesting old eyes. That nigger don’t half clean up, since I left. That furniture, now . . . a damp cloth . . .”
“I wish you would take her back,” Miss Sophia, the elder sister, told Narcissa. “She’s got so crochety since she’s been with you that there’s no living with her. What’s this I hear Horace has taken up—making glassware?”
His proper crucibles and retorts had arrived intact. At first he had insisted on using the cellar, clearing out the lawn mower and the garden tools and all the accumulate impedimenta, and walling up the windows so as to make a dungeon of it. But Narcissa had finally persuaded him upon the upper floor of the garage and here he had set up his furnace and had set fire to the building once and had had tour mishaps and produced one almost perfect vase of clear amber, larger, more richly and chastely serene, which he kept always on his night table and called by his sister’s name in the intervals of apostrophizing both of them impartially in his moments of rhapsody over the realization of the meaning of peace and the unblemished attainment of it, as “Thou still unravished bride of quietness.”
Bareheaded, in flannels and a blue jacket with his Oxford club insignia embroidered on the pocket and his racket under his arm, Horace passed on around the house, and the court came into view with its two occupants in fluid violent action. Beneath an arcade of white pilasters and vine-hung beams.
Belle, surrounded by the fragile, harmonious impedimenta of the moment, was like a butterfly. Two sat with her, in bright relief against the dark foliage of a crape myrtle not yet in flower. The other woman (the third member of the group was a young girl in white, with a grave molasses bang, and a tennis racket across her knees) spoke to him, and Belle greeted him with a sort of languid possessive desolation. Her hand was warm, prehensile, like mercury in his palm exploring softly, with delicate bones and petulant scented flesh. Her eyes were like hothouse grapes and her mouth was redly mobile, rich with discontent.
She had lost Meloney, she told him.
“Meloney saw through your gentility,” Horace said. “You grew careless, probably. Your elegance is much inferior to Meloney’s. You surely didn’t expect to always deceive anyone who can lend as much rigid discomfort to the function of eating and drinking as Meloney could, did you? Or has she got married some more?”
“She’s gone in business,” Belle answered fretfully. “A beauty shop. And why, I can’t for the life of me see. Those things never do last, here. Can you imagine Jefferson women supporting a beauty shop, with the exception of us three? Mrs. Marders and I might; I’m sure we need it, but what use has Frankie for one?”
“What seems curious to me,” the other woman said, “is where the money came from. People thought that perhaps you had given it to her, Belle.”
“Since when have I been a public benefactor?” Belle said coldly. Horace grinned faintly. Mrs. Marders said:
“Now, Belle, we all know how kind-hearted you are; don’t be modest.”
“I said a public benefactor,” Belle repeated. Horace said quickly:
“Well, Harry would swap a handmaiden for an ox, any day. At least, he can save a lot of wear and tear on his cellar, not having to counteract your tea in a lot of casual masculine tummies. I suppose there’ll be no more tea out here, will there?” he added.
“Don’t be silly,” Belle said.
Horace said: “I realize now that it is not tennis that I come here for, but for the incalculable amount of uncomfortable superiority I always feel when Meloney serves me tea. . . . I saw your daughter as I came along.”
“She’s around somewhere, I suppose,” Belle agreed indifferently. “You haven’t had your hair cut yet,” she stated. “Why is it that men have no sense about barbers?” she said generally. The older woman watched Belle and Horace brightly, coldly, across her two flaccid chins. The young girl sat quietly in her simple, virginal white, her racket on her lap and one brown hand lying upon it like a sleeping tan puppy. She was watching Horace with sober interest but without rudeness, as children do. “They either won’t go to the barber at all, or they insist on having their heads all gummed up with pomade and things,” Belle added.
“Horace is a poet,” the other woman said. Her flesh draped loosely from her cheekbones like rich, slightly soiled velvet; her eyes were like the eyes of an old turkey, predatory, unwinking; a little obscene. “Poets must be excused for what they do. You should remember that, Belle.”
Horace bowed toward her. “Your race never fails in tact, Belle,” he said. “Mrs. Marders is one of the few people I know who give the law profession its true evaluation.”
“It’s like any other business, I suppose,” Belle said. “You’re late today. Why didn’t Narcissa come?”
“I mean, dubbing me a poet,” Horace explained. “The law, like poetry, is the final resort of the lame, the halt, the imbecile, and the blind. I dare say Caesar invented the law business to protect himself against poets.”
“You’re so clever,” Belle said.
The young girl spoke suddenly: “Why do you bother about what men put on their hair, Miss Belle? Mr. Mitchell’s bald.”
The other woman laughed, unctuously, steadily, watching them with her lidless unlaughing eyes. She watched Belle and Horace and still laughed steadily, brightly and cold. “‘Out of the mouths of babes—’” she said. The young girl glanced from one to another with her clear, sober eyes. She rose.
“I guess I’ll see if I can get a set now,” she said.
Horace moved also. “Let’s you and I—” he began. Without turning her head Belle touched him with her hand.
“Sit down, Frankie,” she commanded. “They haven’t finished the game yet. You shouldn’t laugh so much on an empty stomach,” she told Mrs. Marders. “Do sit down, Horace.”
The girl stood yet with slim and awkward grace, holding her racket. She looked at Belle a moment, then she turned her face to the court again. Horace took the chair beyond Belle. Her hand dropped hidden into his, with, that secret movement; then it grew passive; it was as though she had turned a current off somewhere—like one entering a dark room in search of something, finding it and pressing the light off again.
“Don’t you like poets?” Horace spoke across Belle’s body. The girl did not turn her head.
“They can’t dance,” she answered. “I guess they are all right, though. They went to the war, the good ones did. There was one was a good tennis player, that got killed. I’ve seen his picture, but I don’t remember his name.”
“Oh, don’t start talking about the war, for heaven’s sake,” Belle said. Her hand stirred in Horace’s. “I had to listen to Harry for two years. Explaining why he couldn’t go. As if I cared whether he did or not.”
“He had a family to support,” Mrs. Marders suggested brightly. Belle half reclined, her head against the chair-back, her hidden hand moving slowly in Horace’s, exploring, turning ceaselessly, like a separate volition curious but without warmth.
“Some of them were aviators,” the girl continued. She stood with one little unemphatic hip braced against the table, her racket clasped beneath her arm, turning the pages of a magazine. Then she closed the magazine and again she watched the two figures leanly antic upon the court. “I danced with one of those Sartoris boys once. I was too scared to know which one it was. I wasn’t anything but a baby, then.”
“Were they poets?” Horace asked. “I mean, the one that got back? I know the other one, the dead one, was.”
“He sure can drive that car of his,” she answered, still watching the players, her straight hair (hers was the first bobbed head in town) not brown, not gold, her brief nose in profile, her brown, still hand clasping her racket. Belle stirred and freed her hand.
“Do go and play, you all,” she said. “You make me nervous, both of you.”
Horace rose with alacrity. “Come on, Frankie. Let’s you and I take ’em on for a set.”
They took the court, matched against the two youths. Horace was an exceptional player, erratic and brilliant. One who knew tennis and who had
