and violent dissolution and adultery; in good time and soon the American scene was to supply her with diversion in the form of bootleggers’ wars, but this was not yet. Her nephew sat without the mellow downward pool of the lamp, with 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 toward him. Then she read again, and there was no sound in the room save the sporadic rustling of the page.
Presently he rose, with one of his sudden plunging movements, and Miss Jenny watched him while he crossed the room and passed through the door and banged it to 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 ceasedshe rose and laid the paper aside and followed him to the front door.
The moon had gotten up beyond the dark eastern wall of the hills and it lay without emphasis upon the valley, mounting like a child’s balloon through the oaks and locusts along the drive. Bayard Sartoris 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, and a thin sourceless odor of locust drifted up intangible as fading tobacco-wraiths, and from the rear of the house, up the dark ball, Elnora’s voice floated in meaningless minor suspense.
Miss Jenny turned aside just within the door and groped about the yawning lesser obscurity of the mirror until she found her nephew’s felt hat, and she 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 away and went back to the library 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 it fell in broad silver bars through the eastern windows:
Before turning up the light she crossed to the southern wall and raised a window there, upon the crickets and frogs and somewhere a mockingbird. Outside this window was a magnolia tree, but it was not to 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 calycanthus where the moon lay upon their bronzeand yet unflowered sleep, and upon those other shoots and graftings from Carolina and Virginian gardens she had known as a girl.
Just beyond the corner from this window the kitchen lay, and Elnora’s voice welled in mellow falling suspense.
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 amid locust-breaths and the ceaseless fairy reiteration of crickets and frogs. There was a mockingbird somewhere down the valley, far away, and in 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 again, and when the sound of it had died away, the whistle of the nine-thirty train swelled from among 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 old fingers and watched the locomotive drag its string of yellowwindows up the valley and into the hills again, where after a time it whistled once more, arrogant and resonant and sad. John Sartoris had sat so on this veranda and watched his two trains emerge from the hills and traverse the valley into the hills again, with lights and smoke and bells and a noisy simulation of speed. But now his railway belonged to a syndicate and there were more than two trains on it, and they ran from Chicago to the Gulf, completing his dream, though John Sartoris himself slept these many years unawares perhaps amid martial cherubim, lapped in the useless vainglory of that Lord which his forefathers had imagined themselves in the rare periods of their metaphysical speculations.
Then his cigar was cold again and he sat and held it in his fingers and watched a tall shape emerge from the lilac bushes along the garden fence and across the patchy moonlight toward the veranda where he sat 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 holding his dead cigar and looked at him.
“Bayard, son?” old Bayard said. Young Bayard stood in the .moonlight His eyesockets 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 from the rail; 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 werecoming?” 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 gran’daddy?”
“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 and spent cigar. “All right, are you?” Young Bayard saw that his hands were trembling.
“Here,” he said, extending his hand. “Let me hold it. You’re going to set your moustache 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.
