“How many have you got, Doctor?” Narcissa asked.
“I don’t rightly know,” he answered. “I got six or seven registered ones, but I don’t know how many scrubs I have. I see a new yearlin’ every day or so.” Simon was watching him with rapt interest.
“You ain’t got no extry room out dar, is you, Doctuh?” he asked. “Here I slaves all de livelong day, keepin’ ’um in vittles en sech.”
“Can you eat cold fish and greens every day?” Dr. Peabody asked him solemnly.
“Well, suh,” Simon answered doubtfully, “I ain’t so sho’ erbout dat, I burnt out on fish once, when I wuz a young man, en I ain’t had no right stomach fer it since.”
“Well, that’s all we have to eat, out home.”
“All right, Simon,” Miss Jenny said. Simon was propped statically against the sideboard, watching Dr. Peabody with musing astonishment.
“En you keeps yo’ size on cole fish en greens? Gentlemun, I’d be a bone-rack on dem kine o’ vittles in two weeks, I sholy would.”
“Simon!” Miss Jenny raised her voice sharply. “Why won’t you let him alone, Loosh, so he can ’tend to his business?” Simon came abruptly untranced and removed the fish. Beneath the table Narcissa slipped her hand in Horace’s again.
“Lay off of Doc, Aunt Jenny,” young Bayard said. He touched his grandfather’s arm. “Can’t you make her let Doc alone?”
“What’s he doing, Jenny?” old Bayard asked. Won’t he eat his dinner?”
“None of us’ll get anything to eat if he sits there and talks to Simon about cold fish and turnip greens,” Miss Jenny replied.
“I think you’re mean, to treat him like you do, Miss Jenny,” Narcissa said.
“Well, it gives me something to be thankful for,” Dr. Peabody answered, “that you never took me when you had the chance. I went and proposed to Jenny once,” he told them.
“You old gray-headed liar,” Miss Jenny said, “you never did any such a thing!”
“Oh, yes, I did. Only I did it on John Sartoris’ account. He said he was havin’ mo’ trouble than he could stand with politics outside his home. And, do you know—”
“Loosh Peabody, you’re the biggest liar in the world!”
“—I pretty near had her persuaded for a while? It was that first spring them weeds she brought out here from Ca’lina bloomed, and there was a moon and we were in the garden and there was a mockin’bird—”
“No such thing!” Miss Jenny shouted. “There never was—”
“Look at her face, if you believe I’m lyin,’” Dr. Peabody said.
“Look at her face,” young Bayard echoed rudely. “She’s blushing!”
And she was blushing, but her cheeks were like banners, and her head was still high amid the gibing laughter. Narcissa rose and came to her and laid her arm about her trim erect shoulders. “You all hush this minute,” she said. “You’d better consider yourselves lucky that any of us ever marry you, and flattered even when we refuse.”
“I am flattered,” Dr. Peabody rejoined, “or I wouldn’t be a widower now.”
“Who wouldn’t be a widower, the size of a hogshead and living on cold fish and turnip greens?” Miss Jenny said. “Sit down, honey. I ain’t scared of any man alive.”
Narcissa resumed her seat, and Simon appeared again, with Isom in procession now, and for’ the next few minutes they moved steadily between kitchen and dining room with a roast turkey and a smoked ham and a dish of quail and another of squirrels, and a baked ’possum in a bed of sweet potatoes and squash and pickled beets, and sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes, and rice and hominy, and hot biscuit and beaten biscuit and delicate long sticks of cornbread, and strawberry and pear preserves, and quince and apple jelly, and stewed cranberries and pickled peaches.
Then they ceased talking for a while and really ate, glancing now and then across the table at one another in a rosy glow of amicability and steamy odors. From time to time Isom entered with hot bread, while Simon stood overlooking the field somewhat as Caesar must have stood looking down into Gaul, once it was well in hand, or the Lord God Himself when He contemplated his latest chemical experiment and saw that it was good.
“After this, Simon,” Dr. Peabody said, and he sighed a little, “I reckon I can take you on and find you a little side meat now and then.”
“I ’speck you kin,” Simon agreed, watching them like an eagle-eyed general who rushes reserves to the threatened points, pressing more food upon them as they faltered. But even Dr. Peabody allowed himself vanquished after a time, and then Simon brought in pies of three kinds, and a small, deadly plum pudding, and a cake baked cunningly with whisky and nuts and fruits and ravishing as odors of heaven and treacherous and fatal as sin; and at last, with an air sibylline and solemnly profound, a bottle of port: The sun lay hazily in the glowing west, falling levelly through the windows and on the silver arrayed on the sideboard, dreaming in mellow gleams among its placid rotundities and on the colored panes in the fanlight high in the western wall.
But that was November, the season of hazy, languorous days, when the first flush of autumn is over and winter beneath the sere horizon breathes yet a spell—November, when like a shawled matron among her children, the year dies peacefully, without pain and of no disease. Early in December the rains set in and the year turned gray beneath the season of dissolution and of death.
All night long and all day it whispered on the roof and along the eaves. The trees shed their final stubborn leaves in it and gestured their black and sorrowful branches against ceaseless vistas; only a lone hickory at the foot of the park kept its leaves, gleaming like a sodden flame on the eternal azure, and beyond the valley the hills were hidden by a swaddling of rain.
Almost daily, despite Miss Jenny’s strictures and commands and the grave protest in Narcissa’s eyes, Bayard went forth with a shotgun and the two dogs, to return just before dark, wet to the skin. And cold; his lips would be chill on hers and his eyes bleak and haunted, and in the yellow firelight of their room she would cling to him, or lie crying quietly in the darkness beside his rigid body, with a ghost between them.
“Look here,” Miss Jenny said, coming on her as she sat brooding before the fire in old Bayard’s den. “You spend too much time this way; you’re getting moony. Stop worrying about him: he’s spent half of his life soaking wet, yet neither one of ’em ever had a cold even, that I can remember.”
“Hasn’t he?” she answered listlessly. Miss Jenny stood beside her chair, watching her keenly. Then she laid her hand on Narcissa’s head, quite gently for a Sartoris.
“Are you worrying because maybe he don’t love you like you think he ought to?”
“It isn’t that,” she answered. “He doesn’t love anybody. He won’t even love the baby. He doesn’t seem to be glad, or sorry, or anything.”
“No,” Miss Jenny agreed. The fire crackled and leaped among the resinous logs. Beyond the gray window the day dissolved endlessly. “Listen,” Miss Jenny said abruptly. “Don’t you ride in that car with him any more. You hear?”
“No. It won’t make him drive slowly. Nothing will.”
“Of course not. Nobody believes it will, not even his grandfather. He goes along for the same reason that boy himself does. Sartoris. It’s in the blood. Savages, everyone of ’em. No earthly use to anybody.” Together they gazed into the leaping flames, Miss Jenny’s hand still lying on Narcissa’s head. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“You didn’t do it. Nobody got me into it. I did it myself.”
“H’m,” Miss Jenny said. And then: “Would you do it over again?” The other did not reply, and she repeated the question. “Would you?”
“Yes,” Narcissa answered. “Don’t you know I would?” Again there was silence between them, in which without words they sealed their hopeless pact with that fine and passive courage of women. Narcissa rose.
“I believe I’ll go in and spend the day with Horace, if you don’t mind,” she said.
“All right,” Miss Jenny agreed. “I believe I would, too. Horace probably needs a little looking after, by now. He looked sort of gaunt when he was out here last week. Like he wasn’t getting proper food.”
When she entered the kitchen door Eunice, the cook, turned from the bread board and lifted her hands in a soft, dark gesture. “Well, Miss Narcy,” she said, “we ain’t seed you in a mont’. Is you come all de way in de rain?”
“I came in the carriage. It was too wet for the car.” She came into the room. Eunice watched her with grave pleasure. “How are you all getting along?”
“He gits enough to eat,” Eunice answered; “I sees to dat. But I has to make him eat it. He needs you back here.”
“I’m here, for the day, anyhow. What have you got for dinner?” Together they lifted lids and peered into the simmering vessels on the stove and in the oven. “Oh, chocolate pie!”
“I has to toll ’im wid dat,” Eunice explained. “He’ll eat anything, ef I jes’ makes ’im a chocolate pie,” she added proudly.
“I bet he does,” Narcissa agreed. “Nobody can make chocolate pies like yours.”
“Dis one ain’t turnt out so well,” Eunice said, deprecatory. “I
