simplicity, growing fainter and fainter where time had lain upon; them. At the top they were still legible, as they were at the foot of the preceding page. But halfway up this page they ceased, and from there on the sheet was blank save for the faint soft mottlings of time and an occasional brownish penstroke significant but without meaning.
Bayard sat for a long time, regarding the stark dissolving apotheosis of his name. Sartorises had derided Time, but Time was not vindictive, because it was longer than Sartorises. And probably unaware of them. But it was a good gesture, anyway. And he recalled his father’s words.
“In the nineteenth century,” John Sartoris had said, ‘‘chording over genealogy anywhere is poppycock. But particularly so in America, where only what a man takes and keeps has any significance, and where all of lis have a common ancestry and the only house from which we can claim descent with any assurance, is the Old Bailey, Yet the man Who professes to care nothing about his forbears is only a little lessvain than he who bases all his actions on blood precedent. And a Sartoris is entitled to a little vanity and poppycock, if he wants it.”
Yes, it was a good gesture, and Bayard sat and mused quietly on the tense he had unwittingly used. Was. Fatality again: the augury of a man’s destiny peeping out at him from the roadside hedge, if he but recognize it; and as he sat and gazed with blind eyes at the page, Time rolled back again and again he ran panting through undergrowth while a Yankee cavalry patrol crashed behind him, crashed fainter and fainter until he crouched with spent, laboring lungs in a bramble thicket and heard their fading thunder along a dim wagon road. Then he crawled forth again and went to a spring he knew that flowed from the roots of a beech tree; and as he leaned his mouth to it the final light of day was reflected onto his face, bringing into sharp relief forehead and nose above the cavernous sockets of his eyes and the panting animal snarl of his teeth, and from the still water there stared back at him for a sudden moment, a skull.
The unturned corners of man’s destiny. Well, heaven, that crowded place, lay just beyond one of them, they claimed; heaven, filled with every man’s illusion of himself and with the conflicting illusions of him that parade through the minds of other illusions...He stirred again and sighed quietly, and took out his fountain pen. At the bottom of the column he wrote:
“John Sartoris. July 5,1918.”
and beneath that:
“Caroline White Sartoris and son. October 27, 1918.”
When the ink was dry he closed the book and replaced it and took the pipe from his pocket and putit in the rosewood box with the dueling pistols and the derringer and replaced the other things and closed the chest and locked it again.
Young Bayard drove her to town the next morning, Old Bayard sat tilted in his chair in the door, and he looked up at her with a fine assumption of surprise and his deafness seemed more pronounced than ordinary. But she got him out of his chair with cold implacability and led him still grumbling along the street, where merchants and loungers before the stores spoke to her as to a martial queen, old Bayard stalking along beside her, with laggard reluctance, like that of a small boy.
But she carriedhim firmly on, and at a row of dingy signs tackedflatto the wall, she turned and mounted a narrow stairway debouching between two stores. At the top was a dark corridor with doors. The nearest door was of pine, its gray paint scarred at the bottom as though it had been kicked repeatedly by feet that struck it at the same height and with the same force. In the door itself, near the edge, two holes an inch apart bore mute witness to the missing hasp, and from a staple in the jamb depended the hasp itself , fixed there by a huge rusty lock of a pattern which had not been manufactured in twenty years. Bayard offered to stop here, but Miss Jenny led him firmly on to the second door across the hall
This door was freshly painted and grained to represent walnut. Into the top half of it was let a pane of thick, opaque glass bearing a name in raised gilt letters, and two embracing office hours. Miss Jenny opened this door and Bayard followed her into a small cubbyhole of a room of spartan but suave asepsis. The walls were an immaculate new gray, with an engraved reproduction of a Corot and two spidery dry-points in narrow frames, and it contained a new rug in warm buff tones and a bare table and four chairs in fumed oak—all impersonal and clean and inexpensive, but revealing at a glance the proprietor’s soul; a soul hampered now by material strictures, but destined and determined to someday function in its proper surroundings—that of Persian rugs and mahogany or teak, and a single irreproachable print on the chaste wall. A young woman in a starched white dress rose from a smaller table in one corner, patting her hair.
“Good morning, Myrtle,” Miss Jenny said. “Tell Dr. Alford we’d like to see him, please.”
“You have an appointment?” the girl said in a voice without any inflection at all.
“We’ll make one now, then,” Miss Jenny replied. “You don’t mean to say Dr. Alford don’t come to work before ten o’clock, do you?”
“Dr. Alford don’t—doesn’t see anyone without an appointment,” the girl parroted, gazing at a point above their heads. “If you have no appointment, you’ll have to have an ap—”
“Tut, tut,” Miss Jenny interrupted briskly, “you run and tell Dr. Alford that Colonel Sartoris wants to see him, there’s a good girl.”
“Yessum, Miss Jenny,” the girl said obediently and she crossed the room, but at the further door she paused again and again her voice became parrot-like. “Won’t you sit down? I’ll see if the doctor is engaged.”
“You go and tell Dr. Alford we’re here,” Miss Jenny repeated affably. “Tell him I’ve got some shopping to do this morning.”
“Yessum, Miss Jenny,” the girl agreed, and disappeared, and after a dignified interval she returned, once more clothed faultlessly in her professional manner. The doctor will see you now. Come in, please,” she said, holding the door open and standing aside.
. “Thank you, honey,” Miss Jenny replied. “Is your mamma still in bed?”
“No’m, she’s sitting up now, thank you.”
“That’s good,” Miss Jenny agreed. “Come on, Bayard.”
This room was smaller than the other, and brutally carbolized, There was a white enameled cabinet filled with vicious nickel gleams, and a metal operating table and an array of electric furnaces and ovens and sterilizers. When they entered, the doctor in a linen jacket bent above a small desk, and for a while he proffered them his sleek oblivious profile. Thenhe glanced up, and rose.
He was in the youthful indeterminate thirties; a newcomer to the town and nephew of an old resident. He had made a fine record in medical school and was of a personable exterior, but there was a sort of preoccupied dignity, a sort of erudite and cold un-illusion regarding mankind, about him that precluded the easy intimacy of the small town and caused even those who remembered his visits during his boyhood to his aunt and uncle, to address him. as doctor or mister. He had a small moustache and a face like a reposeful mask—a comforting face, but cold; and while Bayard sat restively his dry scrubbed fingers probed delicately at the wen on the other’s face. Miss Jenny
