Still kneeling, he lifted the objects out one by one and laid them on the floor. He picked up the coat again, and its fading, stale acridity drifted in his nostrils with an intimation of life and of warmth. “Johnny,” he whispered, “Johnny.” Suddenly he raised the garment toward his face but halted it as sharply, and with the coat half raised he looked swiftly over his shoulder. But immediately he recovered himself and turned his head and lifted the garment and laid his face against it, defiantly and deliberately, and knelt so for a time.
Then he rose and gathered up the book and the trophy and the coat and crossed to his chest of drawers and took from it a photograph. It was a picture of John’s Princeton eating-club group, and he gathered this also under his arm and descended the stairs and passed on out the back door. As he emerged, Simon was just crossing the yard with the carriage, and as he passed the kitchen Elnora was crooning one of her mellow, endless songs.
Behind the smokehouse squatted the black pot and the wooden tubs where Elnora did her washing in fair weather. She had been washing today; the clothesline swung with its damp, limp burden, and beneath the pot smoke yet curled from the soft ashes. He thrust the pot over with his foot and rolled it aside, and from the woodshed he fetched an armful of rich pine and laid it on the ashes. Soon a blaze, pale in the sunny air, and when the wood was burning strongly he laid the coat and the Testament and the trophy and the photograph on the flames and prodded and turned them until they were consumed. In the kitchen Elnora crooned mellowly as she labored. Her voice came rich and plaintful and sad along the sunny reaches of the air. He must remember to breathe shallowly.
Simon drove rapidly to town, but he had been forestalled. The two negroes had told a merchant about finding Bayard on the roadside, and the news had reached the bank, and old Bayard sent for Doctor Peabody.
But Dr. Peabody had gone fishing, so he took Dr. Alford instead, and the two of them in Dr. Alford’s car passed Simon just on the edge of town. He turned about and followed them, but when he arrived home they had young Bayard anesthetized and temporarily incapable of further harm; and when Miss Jenny and Narcissa drove unsuspectingly up the drive an hour later, he was bandaged and conscious again. They had not heard of it. Miss Jenny did not recognize Dr. Alford’s car standing in the drive, but she had one look at the strange motor.
“That fool has killed himself at last,” she said, and she got out of Narcissa’s machine and sailed into the house and up the stairs.
Bayard lay white and still and a little sheepish in his bed. Old Bayard and the doctor were just leaving, and Miss Jenny waited until they were out of the room. Then she raged and stormed at him and stroked his hair while Simon bobbed and mowed in the corner between bed and wall. “Dasso, Miss Jenny, dasso! I kep’ a-tellin’ ’im!”
She left him then and descended to the veranda where Dr. Alford stood in impeccable departure. Old Bayard sat in the car waiting for him, and on Miss Jenny’s appearance he became his stiff self again and completed his departing, and he and old Bayard drove away.
Miss Jenny also looked up and down the veranda, then into the hall. “Where—” she said; then she called. “Narcissa.” A reply. “Where are your” she added. The reply came again, and Miss Jenny reentered the house and saw Narcissa’s white dress in the gloom where she sat on the piano bench. “He’s awake,” Miss Jenny said. “You can come up and see him.” The other rose and turned her face to the light. “Why, what’s the matter?” Miss Jenny demanded. “You look lots worse than he does. You’re white as a sheet.”
“Nothing,” the other answered. “I—” She stared at Miss Jenny a moment, clenching her hands at her sides. “I must go,” she said, and she emerged into the hall. “It’s late, and Horace . . .”
“You can come up and speak to him, can’t you?” Miss Jenny asked, curiously. “There’s not any blood, if that’s what you are afraid of.”
“It isn’t that,” Narcissa answered. “I’m not afraid.”
Miss Jenny approached her, piercing and curious. “Why, all right,” she said kindly, “if you’d rather not. I just thought perhaps you’d like to see he’s all right, as long as you’re here. But don’t if you don’t feel like it.”
“Yes. Yes. I feel like it. I want to.” She passed Miss Jenny and went on. At the foot of the stairs she paused until Miss Jenny came up behind her; then she went on, mounting swiftly and with her face averted.
“What’s the matter with you?” Miss Jenny demanded, trying to see the other’s face. “What’s happened to you? Have you gone and fallen in love with him?”
“In love . . . him? Bayard?” She paused, then hurried on, clutching the rail. She began to laugh thinly, and put her other hand to her mouth. Miss Jenny mounted beside her, piercing and curious and cold. Narcissa hurried on. At the stairhead she stopped again, still with her face averted, and let Miss Jenny pass her, and just without the door she stopped and leaned against it, throttling her laughter and her trembling. Then she entered the room, where Miss Jenny stood beside the bed, watching her.
There was a sickish-sweet lingering of ether in the room, and she approached the bed blindly and stood beside it with her hidden clenched hands. Bayard’s head was pallid and calm, like a chiseled mask brushed lightly over with his spent violence, and he was watching her, and for a while she gazed at him; and Miss Jenny and the room and all, swam away.
“You beast, you beast,” she cried thinly, “why must you always do these things where I’ve got to see you?”
“I didn’t know you were there,” Bayard answered mildly, with weak astonishment.
Every few days, by Miss Jenny’s request, she came out and sat beside his bed and read to him. He cared nothing at all about books; it is doubtful if he had ever read a book on his own initiative, but he would lie motionless in his cast while her grave contralto voice went on and on in the, quiet room. Sometimes he tried to talk to her, but she ignored his attempts and read on; if he persisted, she went away and left him.
So he soon learned to lie, usually with his eyes closed, voyaging alone in the bleak and barren regions of his despair, while her voice flowed on and on above the remoter sounds that came up to them—Miss Jenny scolding Isom or Simon downstairs or in the garden, the twittering of birds in the tree just beyond the window, the ceaseless groaning of the water pump below the barn. At times she would cease and look at him and find that he was peacefully sleeping.
5
Old man Falls came through the lush green of early June, came into town through the yet horizontal sunlight of morning, and in his dusty, neat overalls he now sat opposite old Bayard in immaculate linen and a geranium like a merry wound. The room was cool and still, with the clear morning light and the casual dust of the negro janitor’s infrequent disturbing.
Now that old Bayard was aging and what with the deaf tenor of his stiffening ways, he was showing more and more a preference for surrounding himself with things of a like nature; showing an incredible aptitude for choosing servants who shaped their days to his in a sort of pottering and hopeless futility.
The janitor, who dubbed old Bayard General, and whom old Bayard, and the other clients for whom he performed seemingly interminable duties of a slovenly and minor nature, addressed as Doctor Jones, was one of these. He was black and stooped with querulousness and age, and he took advantage of everyone who would permit him, and old Bayard swore at him all the time he was around and allowed him to steal his tobacco and the bank’s winter supply of coal by the scuttleful and peddle it to other negroes.
The window behind which old Bayard and his caller sat gave upon a vacant lot of rubbish and dusty weeds. It was bounded by weathered rears of sundry one-story board buildings in which small businesses—repair- and junk-shops and such—had their lowly and ofttimes anonymous being.
The lot itself was used by day by country people as a depot for their teams. Already some of these were tethered somnolent and ruminant there, and about the stale ammoniac droppings of their patient generations sparrows swirled in garrulous clouds, or pigeons slanted with sound like rusty shutters and strode and preened in burnished and predatory pomposity, crooning among themselves with guttural unemphasis.
Old man Falls sat on the opposite side of the trash-filled fireplace, mopping his face with a clean blue bandana.
“It’s my damned old legs,” he roared, faintly apologetic. “Used to be I’d walk twelve-fifteen mile to a picnic or a singin’ with less study than what that ’ere little old three mile into town gives me now.” He mopped the handkerchief about that face
