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Sartoris
and doom, that night when he sat beneath the candles in the dining room and turned a wineglass in his fingers while he talked to his son. The railroad was finished, and that day he had been elected to the state legislature after a hard and bitter fight, and doom lay on his brow, and weariness.

“And so,” he said, “Redlaw’ll kill me tomorrow, for I shall be unarmed. I’m tired of killing men. . . . Pass the wine, Bayard.”

And the next day he was dead, whereupon, as though he had but waited for that to release him of the clumsy cluttering of bones and breath, by losing the frustration of his own flesh he could now stiffen and shape that which sprang from him into the fatal semblance of his dream; to be evoked like a genie or a deity by an illiterate old man’s tedious reminiscing or by a charred pipe from which even the rank smell of burnt tobacco had long since faded away.

Old Bayard roused himself and went and laid the pipe on his chest of drawers. Then he quitted the room and tramped heavily down the stairs and out through the back.

The negro lad waked easily and untethered the mare and held the stirrup. Old Bayard mounted and remembered the cigar at last and fired it. The negro opened the gate into the lot and trotted on ahead and opened the second gate and let the rider into the field beyond. Bayard rode on, trailing his pungent smoke. From somewhere a ticked setter came up and fell in at the mare’s heels.

Elnora stood barelegged on the kitchen floor and soused her mop into the pail and thumped it on the floor again.

Sinner riz fum de moaner’s bench,
Sinner jump to de penance bench;
When de preacher ax ’im whut de reason why,
Say, “Preacher got de women jes’ de same ez I.”
Oh, Lawd, oh, Lawd!
Dat’s whut de matter wid de church today.

2

Simon’s destination was a huge brick house set well up to the street. The lot had been the site of a fine old colonial house which stood among magnolias and oaks and flowering shrubs. But the house had burned, and some of the trees had been felled to make room for an architectural garbling so imposingly terrific as to possess a kind of majesty. It was a monument to the frugality (and the mausoleum of the social aspirations of his women) of a hill-man who had moved in from a small settlement called Frenchman’s Bend and who, as Miss Jenny Du Pre put it, had built the handsomest house in Frenchman’s Bend on the most beautiful lot in Jefferson.

The hill-man had stuck it out for two years, during which his womenfolk sat on the veranda all morning in lace-trimmed “boudoir caps” and spent the afternoons in colored silk, riding about town in a rubber-tired surrey; then the hill-man sold his house to a newcomer to the town and took his women back to the country and doubtless set them to work again.

A number of motor cars ranked along the curb lent a formally festive air to the place, and Simon with his tilted cigar stub wheeled up and drew rein and indulged in a brief, colorful altercation with a negro sitting at the wheel of a car parked before the hitching-block. “Don’t block off no Sartoris ca’iage, black boy,” Simon concluded, when the other had moved the motor and permitted him access to the post. “Block off de commonality, ef you wants, but don’t intervoke no equipage waitin’ on Cunnel er Miss Jenny.

Dey won’t stan’ fer it.”
He descended and tethered the horses, and his spirit mollified by the rebuke administered and laved with the beatitude of having gained his own way, Simon paused and examined the motor car with curiosity and no little superciliousness tinged faintly with respectful envy, arid spoke affably with its conductor. But not for long, for Simon had sisters in the Lord in this kitchen, and presently he let himself into the yard and followed the gravel driveway around to the back.

He could hear the party going on as he passed beneath the windows—that sustained, unintelligible gabbling with which white ladies could surround themselves without effort and which they seemed to consider a necessary (or unavoidable) adjunct to having a good time. The fact that it was a card-party would have seemed neither paradoxical nor astonishing to Simon, for time and much absorbing experience had taught him a fine tolerance of white folks’ vagaries and for those of ladies of any color.

The hill-man had built his house so close to the street that the greater part of the original lawn with its fine old trees lay behind it. There were once crape myrtle and syringa and lilac and jasmine bushes without order, and massed honeysuckle on fences and tree trunks; and after the first house had burned, these had taken the place and made of its shaggy informality a mazed and scented jungle loved of mockingbirds and thrushes, where boys and girls lingered on spring and summer nights among drifting fireflies and choiring whippoorwills and usually the liquid tremolo of a screech owl.

Then the hill-man had bought it and cut some of the trees in order to build his house near the street after the country fashion, and chopped out the jungle and whitewashed the remaining trees and ran his barn- and hog- and chicken-lot fences between their ghostly trunks. He hadn’t remained long enough to learn of garages.

Some of the antiseptic desolation of his tenancy had faded now, and its present owner had set out more shrubbery—jasmine and mock orange and verbena—with green iron tables and chairs beneath them, and a pool and a tennis court; and Simon went on with discreet assurance, and on a consonantless drone of female voices he rode into the kitchen, where a thin woman in a funereal purple turban, poising a beaten biscuit heaped with mayonnaise, and a mountainous one in the stained apron of her calling drinking melted ice cream from a saucer, rolled their eyes at him.

“I seed him on de street, and he looked bad; he jes’ don’t favor hisself,” the visitor was saying as Simon entered, but they dropped the theme of the conversation and made him welcome.
“Ef it ain’t Brother Strother,” they said in unison.
“Come in, Brother Strother. How is you?”

“Po’ly, ladies; po’ly,” Simon replied. He doffed his hat and undamped his cigar stub and stowed it away in the hat. “I’se had a right smart mis’ry in de back. Is y’all kep’ well?”
“Right well, I thank you, Brother Strother,” the visitor replied. Simon drew a chair to the table, as he was bidden.

“Whut you gwine eat, Brother Strother?” the cook demanded hospitably. “Dets party fixin’s, en dey’s some col greens en a little sof’ ice cream lef’ fum dinner.”

“I reckon I’ll have a little ice cream en some of dem greens, Sis’ Rachel,” Simon replied. “My teef ain’t so much on party doin’s no mo’.” The cook rose with majestic deliberation and waddled across to a pantry and reached down a platter. She was one of the best cooks in Jefferson; no mistress dared protest against the social amenities of Rachel’s kitchen.

“Ef you ain’t de beatin’es’ man!” the first guest exclaimed. “Eatin’ ice cream at yo’ age!”
“I been eatin’ ice cream sixty years,” Simon said. “Whut reason I got fer quittin’ now?”

“Dat’s right, Brother Strother,” the cook agreed, placing the dish before him. “Eat yo’ ice cream when you kin git it. Jes’ a minute en I’ll—Here, Meloney,” she interrupted herself as a young light negress in a smart white apron and cap entered, bearing a tray of plates containing remnants of edible edifices copied from pictures in ladies’ magazines and possessing neither volume nor nourishment, with which the party had been dulling its palates against supper, “git Brother Strother a bowl of dat ’ere ice cream, honey.”

The girl clashed the tray into the sink and rinsed a bowl at the water tap while Simon watched her with his still little eyes. She whipped the bowl through a towel with a fine show of derogatory carelessness, and with her chin at a supercilious angle she clattered on her high heels across the kitchen, still under Simon’s unwinking regard, and slammed a door behind her. Then Simon turned his head.

“Yes, ma’am,” he repeated, “I been eatin’ ice cream too long ter quit at my age.”

“Dey won’t no vittles hurt you ez long ez you kin stomach ’um,” the cook agreed, raising her saucer to her lips again. The girl returned and with her head still averted she set the bowl of viscid liquid before Simon, who, under cover of this movement, dropped his hand on her thigh. The girl smacked him sharply on the back of his gray head with her flat palm.
“Miss Rachel, can’t you make him keep his hands to hisself?” she said.

“Ain’t you ’shamed,” Rachel demanded, but without rancor, “a ole grayhead man like you, wid a fam’ly of grown chillen and one foot in de graveyard?”
“Hush yo’ mouf, woman,” Simon said placidly, spooning spinach into his melted ice cream. “Ain’t dey erbout breakin’ up in yonder yit?”

“I reckon dey’s erbout to,” the other guest answered, putting another laden biscuit into her mouth with a gesture of elegant gentility; “seems like dey’ talkin’ louder.”
“Den dey’s started playin’ again,” Simon corrected.

“Talkin’ jes’ eased off whiles dey et, Yes, snh, dey’s started playin’ again. Dat’s white folks. Nigger ain’t got sense ernough ter play cards wid all dat racket gwine on.”

But they were breaking up. Miss Jenny Du Pre had

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and doom, that night when he sat beneath the candles in the dining room and turned a wineglass in his fingers while he talked to his son. The railroad was