The room contained an enormous closet with a padlocked door, and a big table littered with yet more casual objects, and a locked roll-top desk (keys and locks were an obsession with him), and a sofa and three big leather chairs. This room was always referred to as the office, and Bayard now sat here with his hat on and still in his riding boots, transferring bourbon whisky from a small rotund keg to a silver-stoppered decanter, while the two dogs watched him with majestic gravity.
One of the dogs was quite old and nearly blind. It spent most of the day lying in the sun in the backyard or, during the hot summer day, in the cool dusty obscurity beneath the kitchen. But toward the middle of the afternoon it went around to the front and waited there quietly and gravely until the carriage came up the drive; and when Bayard had descended and entered the house it returned to the back and waited again until Isom led the mare up and Bayard came out and mounted.
Then together they spent the afternoon going quietly and unhurriedly about the meadows and fields and woods in their seasonal mutations—the man on his horse and the ticked setter gravely beside him, while the descending evening of their lives drew toward its peaceful close upon the kind land that had bred them both.
The young dog was not yet two years old; his net was too hasty for the sedateness of their society overlong, and though at times he set forth with them or came quartering up, splashed and eager, from somewhere to join them in midfield, it was not for long, and soon he must dash away with his tongue flapping and the tense, delicate feathering of his tail in pursuit of the maddening elusive smells with which the world surrounded him and tempted him from every thicket and copse and ravine.
Bayard’s boots were wet to the tops and the sales were caked with mud, and he bent with intent preoccupation over his keg and bottle under the sober curiosity of the dogs. The keg was propped bung-upward in a second chair and he was siphoning the rich brown liquor delicately into the decanter by means of a rubber tube. Miss Jenny entered with her black bonnet still perched on the exact top of her trim white head and the dogs looked up at her, the older with grave dignity, the younger more quickly, tapping his tail on the floor with fawning diffidence. But Bayard didn’t raise his head. Miss Jenny closed the door and stared coldly at his boots.
“Your feet are wet,” she stated. Still he didn’t look up, but held the tube delicately in the bottle-neck while the liquor mounted steadily in the decanter. At times his deafness was very convenient, more convenient than actual, perhaps; but who could know certainly? “You go upstairs and get those boots off,” Miss Jenny commanded, raising her voice; “I’ll fill the decanter.”
But within the serene walled tower of his deafness his imperturbability did not falter until the decanter was full and he pinched the tube and raised it and drained it back into the keg. The older dog had not moved, but the younger one had retreated beyond Bayard, where it lay motionless and alert, its head on its crossed forepaws, watching Miss Jenny with one melting, unwinking eye. Bayard drew the tube from the keg and looked at her for the first time. “What did you say?”
But Miss Jenny returned to the door and opened it and shouted into the hall, eliciting an alarmed response from the kitchen, followed presently by Simon in the flesh. “Go up and get Colonel’s slippers,” she directed. When she turned into the room again neither Bayard nor the keg was visible, but from the open closet door there protruded the young dog’s interested hindquarters and the tense feathering of his barometric tail; then Bayard thrust the dog out of the closet with his foot and emerged himself and locked the door behind him.
“Has Simon come in yet?” he asked.
“He’s coming now,” she answered; “I just called him. Sit down and get those wet boots off.” At that moment Simon entered with the slippers, and Bayard sat obediently and Simon knelt and drew his boots off under Miss Jenny’s martinet eye. “Are his socks dry?” she asked.
“No’m, dey ain’t wet,” Simon answered; But she bent and felt them herself.
“Here,” Bayard said testily, but Miss Jenny ran her hand over both his feet with brusque imperturbability.
“Precious little fault of his if they ain’t,” she said across the topless wall of his deafness. “And then you have to come along with that fool yarn of yours.”
“Section han’ seed ’im,” Simon repeated stubbornly, thrusting the slippers on Bayard’s feet; “I ain’t never said I seed him.” He stood up and rubbed his hands on his thighs.
Bayard stamped into the slippers: “Bring the toddy fixings, Simon. Then to his aunt, in a tone which he contrived to make casual. “Simon says Bayard got off the team this afternoon. But Miss Jenny was storming at Simon again.
“Come back here and get these boots and set ’em behind the stove,” she said. Simon returned and sidled swiftly to the hearth and gathered up the boots. “And take these dogs out of here, too,” she added. “Thank the Lord he hasn’t thought about bringing his horse in with him.” Immediately the old dog came to his feet, and followed by the younger one’s diffident alacrity, departed with that same assumed deliberation with which both Bayard and Simon obeyed Miss Jenny’s brisk implacability.
“Simon says—” Bayard repeated.
“Simon says fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny snapped. “Have you lived with Simon sixty years without learning that he don’t know the truth when he sees it?” And she followed Simon from the room and on to the kitchen, and while Simon’s tall yellow daughter bent over her biscuit board and Simon filled a glass pitcher with fresh water and sliced lemons and set them and a sugar bowl and two tall glasses on a tray, Miss Jenny stood in the doorway and curled Simon’s grizzled remaining hair into tighter kinks yet.
She had a fine command of language at all times, but when her ire was aroused she soared without effort to sublime heights. Hers was a forceful clarity and a colorful simplicity and a bold use of metaphor that Demosthenes would have envied and which even mules comprehended and of whose intent the most obtuse persons remained not long in doubt; and beneath it Simon’s head bobbed lower and lower and the fine assumption of detached preoccupation moulted like feathers from about him, until he caught up the tray and ducked from the room.
Miss Jenny’s voice followed him, descending easily with a sweeping comprehensiveness that included a warning and a suggestion for future conduct for Simon and Elnora and all their descendants, actual and problematical, for some years.
“And the next time,” she concluded, “you, or any section hand, or brakeman, or delivery boy either, sees or hears anything you think will be of interest to Colonel, you tell me about it first; I’ll do all the telling after that.” She gave Elnora another glare for good measure and returned to the office, where her nephew was stirring sugar and water carefully in the two glasses.
Simon in a white jacket officiated as butler—doubled in brass, you might say. Only it was not brass, but silver so fine and soft that some of the spoons were worn now almost to paper thinness where fingers in their generations had held them; silver which Simon’s grandfather Joby had buried on a time beneath the ammoniac barn floor while Simon, aged three, in a single filthy garment, had looked on with a child’s grave interest in the curious game.
An effluvium of his primary calling clung about him always, however, even when he was swept and garnished for church and a little shapeless in a discarded Prince Albert coat of Bayard’s; and his every advent into the dining room with dishes brought with him, and the easy attitudes into which he fell near the sideboard while answering Miss Jenny’s abrupt questions or while pursuing some fragmentary conversation which he and Bayard had been engaged in earlier in the day, disseminated, and his exits left behind him, a faint nostalgia of the stables.
But tonight he brought the dishes in and set them down and scuttled immediately back to the kitchen: Simon realized that again he had talked too much.
Miss Jenny, with a shawl of white wool about her shoulders against the evening’s coolness, was doing the talking tonight, immersing herself and her nephew in a wealth of trivialities—petty doings and sayings and gossip—a behavior which was not like Miss Jenny at all. She had opinions, and a pithy, savagely humorous way of stating them, but it was very seldom that she descended to gossip.
Meanwhile Bayard had shut himself up in that walled tower of his deafness and raised the drawbridge and clashed the portcullis to, where you never knew whether he heard you or not, while his corporeal self ate its supper steadily. Presently they had done, and Miss Jenny rang the little silver bell at her hand and Simon opened the pantry door and received again the cold broadside of her displeasure, and shut the door and lurked behind it until they had left the room.
Bayard lit his cigar in the office and Miss Jenny followed him there and drew her chair to the table
