And after dark, somewhere a dance, with holly and mistletoe and paper streamers, and the girls he had always known with their new bracelets and watches and fans amid lights and music and glittering laughter. . . .
A small group stood on a corner, and as the wagon passed and preceded by an abrupt scurrying, yellow flame was stenciled on the twilight and the heavy explosion reverberated in sluggish echoes between the silent walls. The mules quickened against the collars and the wagon rattled on.
Through the dusk now, from lighted doorways where bells and wreaths hung, voices called with mellow insistence; children’s voices replied, expostulant, reluctantly regretful. Then the station, where a ’bus and four or five cars stood, and Bayard descended and the negro lifted down the sack.
“Much obliged,” Bayard said. “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, white folks.”
In the waiting-room a stove glowed red hot, and about the room stood cheerful groups in sleek furs and overcoats, but he did not enter. He set the sack against the wall and tramped up and down the platform, warming his blood again. In both directions along the tracks green switch-lights were steady in the dusk; a hands-breadth above the western trees the evening star was like an electric bulb in a glass wall.
He tramped back and forth, glancing into the ruddy windows, into the waiting-room where the cheerful groups in their furs and overcoats gesticulated with festive and soundless animation and into the colored waiting-room, whose occupants sat patiently and murmurously about the stove in the dingy light.
As he turned here a voice spoke diffidently from the shadow beside the door. “Chris’mus gif, boss.” He took a coin from his pocket without stopping. Again from the square a firecracker exploded heavily, and above the trees a rocket arced, hung for a moment, then opened like a fist, spreading its golden and fading fingers on the tranquil indigo sky without a sound.
Then the train came and brought its lighted windows to a jarring halt, and he picked up his sack again and in the midst of a cheerful throng shouting good-byes and holiday greetings and messages to absent ones, he got aboard. Unshaven, in his scarred boots and stained khaki pants, and his shabby, smoke-colored tweed jacket and his disreputable felt hat, he found a vacant seat and stowed the jug away beneath his legs.
Part Five
“. . . AND SINCE THE ESSENCE of spring is loneliness and a little sadness and a sense of mild frustration, I suppose you do get a keener purification when a little nostalgia is added in for good measure. At home I always found myself remembering apple trees or green lanes or the color of the sea in other places, and I’d be sad that I couldn’t be everywhere at once, or that all the spring couldn’t be one spring, like Byron’s ladies’ mouths.
But now I seem to be unified and projected upon one single and very definite object, which is something to be said for me, after all.” Horace’s pen ceased and he gazed at the sheet scrawled over with his practically illegible script, while the words he had just written echoed yet in his mind with a little gallant and whimsical sadness, and for the time being he had quitted the desk and the room and the town and all the crude and blatant newness into which his destiny had brought him, and again that wild and fantastic futility of his roamed unchallenged through the lonely region into which it had at last concentrated its conflicting parts.
Already the thick cables along the veranda eaves would be budding into small lilac match-points, and with no effort at all he could see the lawn below the cedars, splashed with random narcissi among random jonquils, and gladioli waiting in turn to bloom.
But his body sat motionless, its hand with the arrested pen lying on the scrawled sheet. The paper lay on the yellow varnished surface of his new desk. The chair in which he sat was new too, as was the room with its dead white walls and imitation oak woodwork.
All day long the sun fell on it, untempered by any shade. In the days of early spring it had been pleasant, falling as it now did through his western window and across the desk where a white hyacinth bloomed in a bowl of glazed maroon pottery.
But as he sat musing, gazing out the window where, beyond a tarred roof that drank heat like a sponge and radiated it, against a brick wall a clump of ragged trees of heaven lifted shabby, diffident bloom, he dreaded the long, hot summer days of sunlight on the roof directly over him: remembered his dim and musty office at home, in which a breeze seemed always to move, with its serried rows of books dusty and undisturbed that seemed to emanate coolness and quietude even on the hottest days. And thinking of this, he was lost again from the harsh newness in which his body sat. The pen moved again.
“Perhaps fortitude is a sorry imitation of something worthwhile, after all, to the so many who burrow along like moles in the dark, or like owls, to whom a candle-flame is a surfeit. But not to those who carry peace along with them as the candle-flame carries light.
I have always been ordered by words, but it seems that I can even restore assurance to my own cowardice by cozening it a little. I dare say you cannot read this, as usual, or reading it, it will not mean anything to you. But you will have served your purpose anyway, thou still unravished bride of quietness.”—“Thou wast happier in thy cage, happier?”
Horace thought, reading the words he had written and in which, as usual, he was washing one woman’s linen in the house of another. A thin breeze blew suddenly into the room; there was locust on it, faintly sweet, and beneath it the paper stirred on the desk, rousing him, and suddenly, as a man waking, he looked at his watch and replaced it and wrote rapidly:
“We are glad to have little Belle with us.
She likes it here; there is a whole family of little girls next door; stair-steps of tow pigtails before whom, it must be confessed, little Belle preens just a little; patronizes them, as is her birthright. Children make all the difference in the world about a house.
Too bad agents are not wise enough to provide rented houses with them. Particularly one like little Belle, so grave and shining and sort of irrelevantly and intensely mature, you know. But then, you don’t know her very well, do you? But we are both very glad to have her with us.
I believe that Harry”—The pen ceased, and still poised, he sought the words that so rarely eluded him, realizing as he did so that, though one can lie about others with ready and extemporaneous promptitude, to lie about oneself requires deliberation and a careful choice of expression.
Then he glanced again at his watch and crossed that out and wrote: “Belle sends love, O Serene,” and blotted it and folded it swiftly into an envelope and addressed and stamped it, and rose and took his hat. By running he could get it on the four o’clock train.
2
In January his aunt received a post card from Bayard mailed at Tampico; a month later, from Mexico City, a wire for money. And that was the last intimation he gave that he contemplated being at any given place long enough for a communication to reach him, although from time to time he indicated by gaudy postals where he had been, after the bleak and brutal way of him.
In April the card came from Rio, followed by an interval during which he seemed to have completely vanished and which Miss Jenny and Narcissa passed quietly at home, their days centered placidly about the expected child which Miss Jenny had already named John.
Miss Jenny felt that old Bayard had somehow flouted them all, had committed lese majesty toward his ancestors and the lusty glamour of the family doom by dying, as she put it, practically from the “inside out.”
Thus he was in something like bad odor with her, and as young Bayard was in more or less abeyance, neither flesh nor fowl, she fell to talking more and more of John. Soon after old Bayard’s death, in a sudden burst of rummaging and prowling which she called winter cleaning, she had found among his mother’s relics a miniature of John done by a New Orleans painter when John and Bayard were about eight.
Miss Jenny remembered that there had been one of each and it seemed to her that she could remember putting them both away together when their mother died. But the other she could not find. So she left Simon to gather up the litter she had made and brought the miniature downstairs to where Narcissa sat in the office, and together they examined it.
The hair even at that early time was of a rich tawny shade, and rather long. “I remember that first day,” Miss Jenny said; “when they came home from school. Bloody as hogs, both of ’em, from fighting other boys who said they looked like girls.
Their mother washed ’em and petted ’em, but they were too busy bragging to Simon and Bayard about the slaughter they had done to mind it much. ‘You ought to seen the others,’ Johnny kept saying. Bayard blew up, of course; said it was
