From the V strut out each wing tipped and swayed, and he jockeyed the thing carefully on, gaining height. He realized that there was a certain point beyond which his own speed was likely to rob him of lifting surface.
He had about two thousand feet now and he turned, and in doing so he found that aileron pressure utterly negatived the inner plane’s dihedral and doubled that of the outer one, and he found himself in the wildest skid he had seen since his Hun days. The machine not only skidded; it flung its tail up like a diving whale and the air speed indicator leaped thirty miles past the dead line the inventor had given him. He was headed back toward the field now, in a shallow dive, and he pulled the stick back.
The wing-tips buckled sharply; he flung the stick forward just before they ripped completely off, and he knew that only the speed of the dive kept him from falling like an inside-out umbrella. And the speed was increasing; already he had overshot the field, under a thousand feet high. He pulled the stick back again; again the wing-tips buckled, and he slapped the stick over and kicked again into that wild skid to check his speed. Again the machine swung its tail in a soaring arc, but this time the wings came off and he ducked his head automatically as one of them slapped viciously past it and crashed into the tail, shearing that too away.
3
That day Narcissa’s child was born, and the following day Simon drove Miss Jenny into town and set her down before the telegraph office and held the horses champing and tossing with gallant restiveness by a slight and surreptitious tightening of the reins, while beneath the top hat and the voluminous duster he contrived by some means to actually strut sitting down.
Dr. Peabody found him so when he came along the street in the June sunlight, in his slovenly alpaca coat, carrying a newspaper.
“You look like a frog, Simon,” he said. “Where’s Miss Jenny?”
“Yessuh,” Simon agreed, “yessuh. Dey’s swellin’ en rejoicin’ now. De little marster done arrive. Yessuh, de little marster done arrive en de ole times comin’ back.”
“Where’s Miss Jenny?” Dr. Peabody repeated impatiently.
“She in dar, tellygraftin’ dat boy ter come on back here whar he belong at.”
Dr. Peabody turned away and Simon watched him, a little fretted at his apathy in the face of the event. “Takes it jes’ like trash,” Simon mused aloud, with annoyed disparagement. “Nummine: we gwine wake ’um all up, now. Yessuh, de olden times comin’ back ergain, sho’. Like in Mars’ John’s time, when de Cunnel wuz de young marster en de niggers fum de quawters gethered on de front lawn, wishin’ Mistis en de little marster well.” And he watched Dr. Peabody enter the door, and through the plate-glass window he saw him approach Miss Jenny as she stood at the counter with her message.
“Come home you fool and see your family or I will have you arrested,” the message read in her firm, lucid script. “It’s more than ten words,” she told the operator, “but that don’t matter this time. He’ll come now; you watch. Or I’ll send the sheriff after him, sure as his name’s Sartoris.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the operator said. He was apparently having trouble reading it, and he looked up after a moment and was about to speak, when Miss Jenny remarked his distraction and repeated the message briskly.
“And make it stronger than that, if you want to,” she added.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said again, and he ducked down behind his desk, and presently and with a little mounting curiosity and impatience Miss Jenny leaned across the counter with a silver dollar in her fingers and watched him count the words three times in a sort of painful flurry.
“What’s the matter, young man?” she demanded. “The government don’t forbid the mentioning of a day-old child in a telegram, does it?”
The operator looked up. “Yes, ma’am, it’s all right,” he said at last, and she gave him the dollar and as he sat holding it in his hand and Miss Jenny watched him with yet more impatience. Dr. Peabody came in and touched her arm.
“Come away, Jenny,” he said.
“Good morning,” she said, turning at his voice. “Well, it’s about time you took notice. This is the first Sartoris you’ve been a day late on in how many years, Loosh? And soon as I get that fool boy home, it’ll be like old times again, as Simon says.”
“Yes. Simon told me. Come along here.”
“Let me get my change.” She turned to the counter, where the operator stood with the message in one hand and the coin in the other. “Well, young man? Ain’t a dollar enough?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he repeated, turning on Dr. Peabody his dumb, distracted eyes. Dr. Peabody reached fatly and took the message and the coin from him.
“Come along, Jenny,” he said again. Miss Jenny stood motionless for a moment, in her black silk dress and her black bonnet set squarely on her head, staring at him with her piercing old eyes that saw so much and so truly.
Then she walked steadily to the door and stepped into the street and waited until he joined her, and her hand was steady too as she took the folded paper he offered. MISSISSIPPI AVIATOR it said in discreet capitals, and she returned it to him immediately and from her waist she took a small sheer handkerchief and wiped her fingers lightly.
“I don’t have to read it,” she said. “They never get into the papers but one way. And I know that he was somewhere he had no business being, doing something that wasn’t any affair of his.”
“Yes,” Dr. Peabody said. He followed her to the carriage and put his hands clumsily on her as she mounted.
“Don’t paw me, Loosh,” she snapped; “I’m not a cripple.” But he supported her elbow with his huge, gentle hand until she was seated; then he stood with his hat off while Simon laid the linen robe across her knees.
“Here,” he said, extending her the silver dollar. She returned it to her bag and clicked it shut and wiped her fingers again on her handkerchief.
“Well,” she said. Then: “Thank God that’s the last one. For a while, anyway. Home, Simon.”
Simon sat magnificently, but under the occasion he unbent a little. “When you gwine come out en see de young marster, Doctuh?”
“Soon, Simon,” he answered, and Simon clucked to the horses and wheeled away with a flourish, his hat tilted and the whip caught smartly back. Dr. Peabody stood in the street, a shapeless hogshead of a man in a shabby alpaca coat, his hat in one hand and the folded newspaper and the yellow unsent message in the other, until Miss Jenny’s straight slender back and the square indomitable angle of her bonnet had passed from sight.
But that was not the last one. One morning a week later, Simon was found in a negro cabin in town, his grizzled head crushed in by a blunt instrument anonymously wielded.
“In whose house?” Miss Jenny demanded into the telephone. In that of a woman named Meloney Harris, the voice told her. Meloney . . . Mel . . . Belle Mitchell’s face flashed before her mind, and she remembered: the mulatto girl whose smart cap and apron and lean, shining shanks had lent such an air to Belle’s parties, and who had quit Belle in order to set up a beauty parlor. Miss Jenny thanked the voice and hung up the receiver.
“The old grayheaded reprobate,” she said, and she went into old Bayard’s office and sat down. “So that’s where that church money went that he ‘put out.’ I wondered. . . .” She sat stiffly and uncompromisingly erect in her chair, her hands idle on her lap. “Well, that is the last one of ’em,” she thought.
But no, he was hardly a Sartoris: he had at least some shadow of a reason, while the others . . . “I think,” Miss Jenny said, who had not spent a day in bed since she was forty years old, “that I’ll be sick for a while.”
And she did just exactly that. Went to bed, where she lay propped on pillows in a frivolous lace cap, and would permit no doctor to see her save Dr. Peabody, who called once informally and sat sheepishly for thirty minutes while Miss Jenny vented her invalid’s spleen and the recurred anger of the salve fiasco on him. And here she held daily councils with Isom and Elnora, and at the most unexpected moments she would storm with unimpaired vigor from her window at Isom and Caspey in the yard beneath.
The child and the placid, gaily turbaned mountain who superintended his hours, spent most of the day in this room, and presently Narcissa herself; and the three of them would sit for rapt, murmurous hours in a sort of choral debauch of abnegation while the object of it slept digesting, waked, stoked himself anew, and slept again.
“He’s a Sartoris, all right,” Miss Jenny said, “but an improved model. He hasn’t got that wild look of ’em. I believe it was the name. Bayard. We did well to name him Johnny.”
“Yes,” Narcissa said, watching her sleeping son with grave and tranquil serenity.
And there Miss Jenny stayed until her while was up. Three weeks it was. She set the date before she went to bed and held to it stubbornly, refusing even to
