“People don’t usually lie about things that don’t concern them,” he answered wearily. “They are impervious to the world, even if they aren’t to life. Not when the actuality is so much more diverting than their imaginings could be,” he added. She freed her arm with grave finality.
“Narcy—”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t call me that,” The next corner, beneath the next light, was theirs; they would turn there. Above the arched canyon of the street the sinister gods stared down with pale unwinking eyes.
Horace thrust his hands into his jacket and for a space he was stilled again while his fingers learned the unfamiliar object they had found in his pocket. Then he drew it forth: a sheet of heavy notepaper, folded twice and impregnated with a fading heavy scent. A familiar scent, yet baffling for the moment, like a face watching him from an arras. He knew the face would emerge in a moment, but as he held the note in his fingers and sought the face through the corridors of his present distraction, his sister spoke suddenly and hard at his side.
“You’ve got the smell of her all over you. Oh, Harry, she’s dirty!”
“I know,” he answered unhappily. “I know.”
It was now well into June, and the scent of Miss Jenny’s transplanted jasmine drifted steadily into the house and filled it with constant cumulate waves like a fading resonance of viols.
The earlier flowers were gone, and the birds had finished eating the strawberries and now sat about the fig bushes all day, waiting for them to ripen; zinnia and delphinium bloomed without any assistance from Isom, who, since Caspey had more or less returned to normalcy and laying-by time was yet a. while away, might be found on the shady side of the privet hedge along the garden fence, trimming the leaves one by one from a single twig with a pair of mule shears until Miss Jenny returned to the house; whereupon he retreated himself and lay on the creekbank for the rest of the afternoon, his hat over his eyes and a cane fishing pole propped between his toes.
Simon pottered querulously about the place. His linen duster and top hat gathered chaff and dust on the nail in the harness room, and the horses waxed fat and lazy and insolent in the pasture.
The duster and hat came down from the nail and the horses were harnessed to the carriage but once a week now—on Sundays, to drive in to town to church. Miss Jenny said she was too far along to jeopardize salvation by driving to church at fifty miles an hour; that she had as many sins as her ordinary behavior could take care of particularly as she had old Bayard’s soul to get into heaven somehow also, what with him and young Bayard tearing: around the country every afternoon at the imminent risk of their necks. About young Bayard’s soul Miss Jenny did not alarm herself at all: he had no soul.
Meanwhile he rode about the farm and harried the negro tenants in his cold fashion, and in two-dollar khaki breeches and a pair of field boots that had cost fourteen guineas he tinkered with farming machinery and with the tractor he had persuaded old Bayard to buy: for the time being he had become almost civilized again. He went to town only occasionally now, and often on horseback, and all in all his days had become so usefully innocuous that both his aunt and his grandfather were growing a little nervously anticipatory.
“Mark my words,” Miss Jenny told Narcissa on the day she drove out again, “he’s storing up devilment that’s going to burst loose all at once, some day. And then there’ll be hell to pay. Lord knows what it’ll be—maybe he and Isom will take his car and that tractor and hold a steeple-chase with ’em . . . What did you come out for? Got another letter?”
“I’ve got several more,” Narcissa answered lightly. “I’m saving them until I get enough for a book: then I’ll bring them all out for you to read.” Miss Jenny sat opposite her, erect as a crack guardsman, with that cold briskness of hers that caused agents and strangers to stumble through their errands with premonitions of failure before they began. The guest sat motionless, her. limp straw hat on her knees. “I just came to see you,” she added, and for a moment her face held such grave and still despair that Miss Jenny sat more erect yet and stared at her guest with her piercing gray eyes.
“Why, what is it, child? Did the man walk into your house?”
“No, no.” The look was gone, but still Miss Jenny watched her with those keen old eyes that seemed to see so much more than you thought—or wished. “Shall I play a while? It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Well,” Miss Jenny agreed, “if you want to.”
There was dust on the piano. Narcissa opened it with a fine gesture. “If you’ll let me get a cloth—”
“Here, lemme dust it,” Miss Jenny said, and she caught up her skirt by the hem and mopped the keyboard violently. “There, that’ll do.” Then she drew her chair from behind the instrument and seated herself.
She still watched the other’s profile with speculation and a little curiosity, but presently the old tunes stirred her memory again, and in a while her eyes softened, and the other and the trouble that had shown momentarily in her face were lost in Miss Jenny’s own vanquished and abiding dead days, and it was some time before she realized that Narcissa was weeping quietly while she played.
Miss Jenny leaned forward and touched her arm. “Now, you tell me what it is,” she commanded. And Narcissa told her in her grave contralto, still weeping quietly.
“Humph,” Miss Jenny said. “That’s to be expected of a man that hasn’t any more to do than Horace has. I don’t see why you are so upset over it.”
“But that woman,” Narcissa wailed suddenly, like a little girl, burying her face in her hands. “She’s so dirty!”
Miss Jenny dug a man’s handkerchief from the pocket of her skirt and gave it to the other. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Don’t she wash often enough?”
“Not that way. I m-mean she’s—she’s—” Narcissa turned suddenly and laid her head on the piano.
“Oh,” Miss Jenny said. “All women are, if that’s what you mean.” She sat stiffly indomitable, contemplating the other’s shrinking shoulders. “Hmph,” she said again, “Horace has spent so much time being educated that he never has learned anything. . . . Why didn’t you break it up in time? Didn’t you see it coming?”
The other wept more quietly now. She sat up and dried her eyes on Miss Jenny’s handkerchief. “It started before he went away. Don’t you remember?”
“That’s so. I do sort of remember a lot of women’s gabble. Who told you about it, anyway? Horace?”
“Mrs. Marders did. And then Horace did. But I never thought that he’d—I never thought—” Again her head dropped to the piano, hidden in her arms. “I wouldn’t have treated Horace that way,” she wailed.
“Sarah Marders, was it? I might have known. . . . I admire strong character, even if it is bad,” Miss Jenny stated. “Well, crying won’t help any.” She rose briskly. “We’ll think what to do about it. Only I’d let him go ahead: it’ll do him good if she’ll just turn around and make a doormat of him. . . . Too bad Harry hasn’t got the spunk to . . .
But I reckon he’ll be glad; I know I would. . . . There, there,” she said, at the other’s movement of alarm, “I don’t reckon Harry’ll hurt him. Dry your face, now. You better go to the bathroom and fix up. Bayard’ll be coming in soon, and you don’t want him to see you’ve been crying, you know.” Narcissa glanced swiftly at the door and dabbed at her face with Miss Jenny’s handkerchief.
Then he would seek her through the house, and cross the drive and descend the lawn in the sunny afternoon to where she sat in the white dresses he loved beneath the oak, into which a mockingbird came each afternoon to sing, bringing her the result of his latest venture in glass-blowing.
He had five now, in different colors and all nearly perfect, and each of them had a name. And as he finished them and while they were scarce cooled, he must bring them across the lawn to where she sat with a book or with a startled caller perhaps—in his stained disheveled clothes and his sooty hands in which the vase lay demure and fragile as a bubble, and with his face blackened too with smoke and a little mad, passionate and fine and austere.
4
For a time the earth held him in a hiatus that might have been called contentment. He was up at sunrise, planting things in the ground and watching them grow and tending them; he cursed and harried niggers and mules into motion and kept them there, and put the grist mill into running shape and taught Caspey to drive the tractor, and came in at mealtimes and at night smelling of machine oil and of stables and of the earth, and went to bed with grateful muscles and with the sober rhythms of the earth in his body
