Where he lurked behind the pantry door Simon could hear the steady storming of Miss Jenny’s and old Bayard’s voices; later when they had removed to the office and Elnora and Caspey and Isom sat about the table in the kitchen waiting for him, the concussion of Miss Jenny’s raging and old Bayard’s rocklike stubborness came in muffled surges, as of far-away surf.
“What de quoilin’ erbout now?” Caspey asked. “Is you been and done somethin’?” he demanded of his nephew.
Isom rolled his eyes quietly above his steady jaws. “Naw, suh,” he mumbled. “I ain’t done nuthin’.”
“Seems like dey’d git wo’ out, after a while. What’s pappy doin’, Elnora?”
“Up dar in de hall, listenin’. Go tell ’im to come on and git his supper, so I kin git done, Isom.”
Isom slid from his chair, still chewing, and left the kitchen. The steady raging of the two voices increased; where the shapeless figure of his grandfather stood like a disreputable and ancient bird in the dark hallway, Isom could distinguish words: poison . . . blood . . . think you can cut your head off and cure it . . . fool put it on your foot but . . . face head . . . dead and good riddance . . . fool of you dying because of your own bull-headed folly . . . you first lying on your back though . . .
“You and that damn doctor are going to worry me to death.” Old Bayard’s voice drowned the other temporarily. “Will Falls won’t have a chance to kill me. I can’t sit in my chair in town without that damn squirt sidling around me and looking disappointed because I’m still alive on my feet. And when I get home, get away from him, you can’t even let me eat supper in peace. Have to show me a lot of damn colored pictures of what some fool thinks a man’s insides look like.”
“Who gwine die, pappy?” Isom whispered.
Simon turned his head. “Whut you hangin’ eround here fer, boy? Go’n back to dat kitchen, whar you belongs.”
“Supper waitin’,” Isom said. “Who dyin’, pappy?”
“Ain’t nobody dyin’. Does anybody soun’ dead? You git on outen de house, now.”
Together they returned down the hall and entered the kitchen. Behind them the voices raged and stormed, blurred a little by walls, but dominant and unequivocal.
“Whut dey fightin’ erbout now?” Caspey, chewing, asked.
“Dat’s white folks’ bizness,” Simon told him: “You tend to yo’n, and dey’ll git erlong all right.” He sat down and Elnora rose and filled a cup from the coffee pot on the stove and brought it to him. “White folks got dey troubles same as niggers is. Gimme dat dish o’ meat, boy.”
In the house the storm ran its nightly course, ceased as though by mutual consent, both parties still firmly entrenched; resumed at the supper table the next evening. And so on, day after day, until in the second week in July and six days after young Bayard had been fetched home with his chest crushed, Miss Jenny and old Bayard and Dr. Alford went to Memphis to consult a well-known authority on blood and glandular diseases with whom Dr. Alford, with some difficulty, had made a formal engagement. Young Bayard lay upstairs in his cast, but Narcissa Benbow had promised to come out and keep him company during the day.
Between the two of them they got old Bayard on the early train, still protesting profanely, like a stubborn and bewildered ox. There were others who knew them in the car and who remarked Dr. Alford’s juxtaposition and became curious and solicitous. Old Bayard took these opportunities to assert himself again, with violent rumblings which Miss Jenny ignored.
They took him, like a sullen small boy, to the clinic where the specialist was to meet them, and in a room resembling an easy and informal summer hotel lobby they sat among quiet, waiting people talking in whispers, and an untidy clutter of papers and magazines, waiting for the specialist to arrive. They waited a long time.
Meanwhile from time to time, Dr. Alford assaulted the impregnable affability of the woman at the switchboard, was repulsed, and returned and sat stiffly beside his patient, aware that with every minute he was losing ground in Miss Jenny’s opinion of him. Old Bayard was cowed too, by now, though occasionally he rumbled hopefully at Miss Jenny.
“Oh, stop swearing at me,” she interrupted him at last. “You can’t walk out now. Here, here’s the morning paper—take it, and be quiet.”
Then the specialist entered briskly and went to the switchboard woman, where Dr. Alford saw him and rose and went to him. The specialist turned—a brisk, dapper man, who moved with arrogant, jerky motions, as though he were exercising with a smallsword, and who in turning almost stepped on Dr. Alford. He gave Dr. Alford a glassy, impatient stare; then he shook his hand and broke into a high, desiccated burst of words. “On the dot, I see. Promptness. Promptness. That’s good. Patient here? Stood the trip all right, did she?”
“Yes, Doctor, he’s—”
“Good; good. Undressed and all ready, eh?”
“The patient is a m—”
“Just a moment.” The specialist turned. “Oh, Mrs. Smith.”
“Yes, Doctor.” The woman at the switchboard did not raise her head, and at that moment another specialist of some kind, a large one, with a majestic, surreptitious air like a royal undertaker, entered and stopped Dr. Alford, and for a while the two of them rumbled and rattled at one another while Dr. Alford stood ignored nearby, fuming stiffly and politely, feeling himself sinking lower and lower in Miss Jenny’s opinion of his professional status. Then the two specialists had done, and Dr. Alford led his man toward the patient.
“Got the patient all ready you say? Good; good; save time. Lunching down town today. Had lunch yourself?”
“No, Doctor. But the patient is a—”
“Dare say not,” the specialist agreed. “Plenty of time, though.” He turned briskly toward a curtained exit, but Dr. Alford took his arm firmly but courteously and halted him. Old Bayard was reading the paper. Miss Jenny was watching them frigidly, her bonnet on the exact top of her head.
“Mrs. Du Pre; Colonel Sartoris,” Dr. Alford said, “this is Dr. Brandt. Colonel Sartoris is your p—”
“How d’ye do? How d’ye do? Come along with the patient, eh? Daughter? Granddaughter?” Old Bayard looked up.
“What?” he said, cupping his ear, and found the specialist staring at his face.
“What’s that on your face?” he demanded, jerking his hand forth and touching the blackened excrescence. When he did so the thing came off in his fingers, leaving on old Bayard’s withered but unblemished cheek a round spot of skin rosy and fair as any baby’s.
On the train that evening old Bayard, who had sat for a long time in deep thought, spoke suddenly.
“Jenny, what day of the month is this?”
“The ninth,” Miss Jenny answered. “Why?”
Old Bayard sat for a while longer. Then he rose. “Think I’ll go up and smoke a cigar,” he said. “I reckon a little tobacco won’t hurt me, will it, Doctor?”
Three weeks later they got a bill from the specialist for fifty dollars. “Now I know why he’s so well known,” Miss Jenny said acidly. Then to her nephew: “You better thank your stars it wasn’t your hat he lifted off.”
Toward Dr. Alford her manner is fiercely and belligerently protective; to old man Falls she gives the briefest and coldest of nods and sails on with her nose in air; but to Loosh Peabody she does not speak at all.
7
She passed from the fresh, hot morning into the cool hall, where Simon, uselessly and importantly proprietorial with a duster, bobbed his head to her. “Dey done gone to Memphis today,” he told her. “But Mist’ Bayard waitin’ fer you. Walk right up, Missy.”
“Thank you,” she answered, and she went on and mounted the stairs and left him busily wafting dust from one surface to another and then back again. She mounted into a steady draft of air that blew through the open doors at the end of the hall. Through these doors she could see a segment of blue hills and salt-colored sky. At Bayard’s door she stopped and stood there for a time, clasping the book to her breast.
The house, despite Simon’s activity in the hall below, was a little portentously quiet without the reassurance of Miss Jenny’s bustling presence. Faint sounds reached her from far away—out-of-door sounds whose final drowsy reverberations drifted into the house on the vivid July air; sounds too somnolent and remote to die away.
But from the room before her no sound came at all. Perhaps he was asleep, and the initial impulse—her passed word, and the fortitude of her desperate heart which had enabled her to come out despite Miss Jenny’s absence—having served its purpose and deserted her, she stood just without the door, hoping that he was asleep, that he would sleep all day.
But she would have to enter the room in order to find if he slept, so she touched her hands to her face, as though by that she would restore to it its wonted serene repose for him to see, and entered.
“Simon?” Bayard said. He lay on his back, his hands beneath his head, gazing out the window across the room, and she paused again just within the door. At last, roused by her silence, he turned his head and his bleak gaze. “Well, I’m damned. I didn’t believe you’d come out today.”
“Yes,” she answered. “How do you feel?”
“Not after
