Her nephew sat beyond the mellow downward pool of the lamp, his feet braced against the corner of the hearth, from which his boot soles and the boot soles of John Sartoris before him had long since worn the varnish away, puffing his cigar. He was not reading, and at intervals Miss Jenny glanced above her glasses and across the top of the paper at him. Then she read again, and. there was no sound in the room save the sporadic rustling of the page.
After a time he rose, with one of his characteristic plunging movements, and she watched him as he crossed the room and passed through the door and banged it behind him. She read on for a while longer, but her attention had followed the heavy tramp of his feet up the hall, and when this ceased she rose and laid the paper aside and followed him to the front door.
The moon had got up beyond the dark eastern wall of hills and it lay without emphasis upon the valley, mounting like a child’s balloon behind the oaks and locusts along the drive. Bayard sat with his feet on the veranda rail, in the moonlight.
His cigar glowed at spaced intervals, and a shrill monotone of crickets rose from the immediate grass and further away, from among the trees, a fairy-like piping of young frogs like endless silver small bubbles rising. A thin, sourceless odor of locust drifted up, intangible as fading tobaccco-wraiths, and from the rear of the house, up the dark hall, Elnora’s voice floated in meaningless minor suspense.
Miss Jenny groped in the darkness beside the door, and from beside the yawning lesser obscurity of the mirror she took Bayard’s hat from the hook and carried it out to him and put it in his hand. “Don’t sit out here too long, now. It ain’t summer yet.”
He grunted indistinguishably, but he put the hat on and she turned and went back to the office, and finished the paper and folded it and laid it on the table. She snapped the light off and mounted the dark stairs to her room. The moon shone above the trees at this height and fell in broad silver bars through the eastern windows.
Before turning on the light she crossed to the southern wall and raised a window there, upon the crickets and frogs and somewhere a mockingbird. Outside the window was a magnolia tree, but it was not in bloom yet, nor had the honeysuckle massed along the garden fence flowered. But this would be soon, and from here she could overlook the garden, could look down upon Cape jasmine and syringa and callacanthus where the moon lay upon their bronze and yet unflowered sleep, and upon other shoots and graftings from the far-away Carolina gardens she had known as a girl.
Just beyond the corner, from the invisible kitchen, Elnora’s voice welled in mellow, falling suspense. “All folks talkin’ ’bout heaven ain’t gwine dar,” Elnora sang, and presently she and Simon emerged into the moonlight and took the path to Simon’s cabin below the barn. Simon had fired his cigar at last, and the evil smoke of it trailed behind him, fading.
But when they had gone the rank pungency of it seemed still to linger within the sound of the crickets and of the frogs upon the silver air, mingled and blended inextricably with the dying fall of Elnora’s voice: “All folks talkin’ ’bout heaven ain’t gwine dar.”
His cigar was cold, and he moved and dug a match from his waistcoat and relit it and braced his feet again upon the railing, and again the drifting sharpness of tobacco lay along the windless currents of the silver air, straying and fading slowly with locust-breaths and the ceaseless fairy reiteration of crickets and frogs.
There was a mockingbird somewhere down the valley, and after a while another sang from the magnolia at the corner of the garden fence. An automobile passed along the smooth valley road, slowed for the railway crossing, then sped on. Before the sound of it had died away the whistle of the nine-thirty train drifted down from the hills.
Two long blasts with dissolving echoes, two short following ones, but before it came in sight his cigar was cold again and he sat holding it in his fingers and watched the locomotive drag its string of yellow windows up the valley and into the hills once more, where after a time it whistled again, arrogant and resonant and sad.
John Sartoris had sat so on this veranda and watched his two daily trains emerge from the hills and cross the valley into the hills, with lights and smoke and a noisy simulation of speed.
But now the railway belonged to a syndicate and there were more than two trains on it that ran from Lake Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico, completing his dream, while John Sartoris slept among marital cherubim and the useless vainglory of whatever God he did not scorn to recognize.
Old Bayard’s cigar was cold again. He sat with it dead in his fingers and watched a tall shape emerge from the lilac bushes beside the garden fence and cross the patchy moonlight toward the veranda. His grandson wore no hat and he came on and mounted the steps and stood with the moonlight bringing the hawklike planes of his face into high relief while his grandfather sat with his dead cigar and looked at him.
“Bayard, son?” old Bayard said. Young Bayard stood in the moonlight. His eye sockets were cavernous shadows.
“I tried to keep him from going up there on that goddam little popgun,” he said at last with brooding savageness. Then he moved again and old Bayard lowered his feet, but his grandson only dragged a chair violently up beside him and flung himself into it. His motions were abrupt also, like his grandfather’s, but controlled and flowing for all their violence.
“Why in hell didn’t you let me know you were coming?” old Bayard demanded. “What do you mean, straggling in here like this?”
“I didn’t let anybody know.” Young Bayard dug a cigarette from his pocket and raked a match on his shoe.
“What?”
“I didn’t tell anybody I was coming,” he repeated above the cupped match, raising his voice.
“Simon knew it. Do you inform nigger servants of your movements instead of your own granddaddy?”
“Damn Simon, sir,” young Bayard shouted. “Who set him to watching me?”
“Don’t yell at me, boy,” old Bayard shouted in turn. His grandson flung the match away and drew at the cigarette in deep, troubled draughts. “Don’t wake Jenny,” old Bayard added more mildly, striking a match to his cold cigar. “All right, are you?”
“Here,” young Bayard said, extending his hand, “let me hold it. You’re going to set your mustache on fire.” But old Bayard repulsed him sharply and sucked stubbornly and impotently at the match in his unsteady fingers.
“I said, are you all right?” he repeated.
“Why not?” young Bayard snapped. “Takes damn near as big a fool to get hurt in a war as it does in peacetime. Damn fool, that’s what it is.” He drew at the cigarette again, then he hurled it, not half consumed, after the match. “There was one I had to lay for four days to catch. Had to get Sibleigh in an old crate of an Ak. W. to suck him in for me. Wouldn’t look at anything but cold meat, him and his skull and bones. Well, he got it.
Stayed on him for six thousand feet, put a whole belt right into his cockpit. You could ’a’ covered ’em all with your hat. But the bastard just wouldn’t burn.” His voice rose again as he talked on. Locust drifted up in sweet gusts, and the crickets and frogs were clear and monotonous as pipes blown drowsily by an idiot boy.
From her silver casement the moon looked down upon the valley dissolving in opaline tranquillity into the serene mysterious infinitude of the hills, and young Bayard’s voice went on and on, recounting violence and speed and death.
“Hush,” old Bayard said again. “You’ll wake Jenny.” And his grandson’s voice sank obediently, but soon it rose again, and after a time Miss Jenny emerged with the white woolen shawl over her nightdress and came and kissed him.
“I reckon you’re all right,” she said, “or you wouldn’t be in such a bad humor. Tell us about Johnny.”
“He was drunk,” young Bayard answered harshly, “or a fool. I tried to keep him from going up there, on that damn Camel. You couldn’t see your hand that morning. Air all full of hunks of cloud, and any fool could ’a’ known that on their side it’d be full of Fokkers that could reach twenty-five thousand, and him on a damn Camel.
But he was hell-bent on going up there, damn near to Lille. I couldn’t keep him from it. He shot at me,” young Bayard said; “I tried to drive him back but he gave me a burst. He was already high as he could get, but they must have been five thousand feet above us. They flew
