The road dipped, then rose again in a long slant broken by another dip; then it stood directly before them like a wall. The car shot upward and over the dip, left the road completely, then swooped dreadfully on, and the negroes’ concerted wail whipped forlornly away. Then the ridge attained its crest and the car’s thunder ceased and it came slowly to a stop. The negroes sat now in the bottom of the tonneau.
“Is dis heaven?” one murmured after a time.
“Dey wouldn’t let you in heaven, wid licker on yo’ breaf and no hat, feller,” another said.
“Ef de Lawd don’t take no better keer of me dan He done of dat hat, I don’t wanter go dar, noways,” the first rejoined.
“Mmmmm,” the second agreed.“When us come down dat ‘ere las’ hill, dis yere cla’inet almos’ blowed clean outen my han’,, let ‘lone my hat.”
“And when us jumped over dat ‘ere lawg er whut-ever it wuz back dar,” the, third one added, “I thought for a minute dis whole auto’bile done blowedoutenmy han’.”
They drank again. It was high here, and the air moved with gray coolness. On either hand lay a valley filled with shadow and with ceaseless whip-poor-wills; beyond these valleys the silver earth rolled on into the sky. Across it, sourceless and mournful and far, a dog howled. Before them the lights on the courthouse clock were steadfast and yellow and unwinking in the dissolving distance, but in all other directions the world rolled away in slumbrous ridges, milkily opaline. Bayard’s head felt as cool and clear as a clapperless and windless bell. Within it that head emerged clearly at last, those two eyesround with grave astonishment, winged serenely by two dark wings of hair. He sat for a while in the motionless car, gazing into the sky.
“It was that Benbow girl,”he said to himself quietly.
All of her instincts were antipathetic toward him, toward his violence and his brutally obtuse disregard of all the qualities which composed her being. His idea was like a trampling of heavy feet in those cool corridors of hers, in that grave serenity in which her days accomplished themselves; at the very syllables of his name her instincts brought her upstanding and under arms against him, thus increasing, doubling the sense of violation by the act of repulsing him and by the necessity for it. And yet, despite her armed sentinels, he still crashed with that hot violence of his through the bastions and thundered at the very inmost citadel of her being. Even chance seemed to abet him, lending to his brutal course a sort of theatrical glamor, a tawdry simulation of the virtues which the reasons (if he had reasons) for his actions outwardly ridiculed. That mad flaming beast he rode almost over her car and then swerved it with an utter disregard of consequences to himself onto a wet sidewalk in order to avoid a frightened child; the pallid, suddenly dreaming calm of his bloody face from which violence had been temporarily wiped as with a damp cloth, leaving it still with that fine bold austerity of Roman statuary, beautiful as a flame shaped in bronze and cooled: the outward form of its energy but without its heat,
Her appetite was gone at sapper, and Aunt Sally mouthed her prepared soft food and mumbled querulously at her because she would not eat But eat she could not; there was still between her and any desire for food the afternoon’s experience like a recurring echo in her violated corridors—the mad rash of the beast and its rider like a bronze tidal wave, into which the small running figure in white and pale blue was sucked and overwhelmed and spewed forth again unscathed while the wave spent its blind fury and ebbed, leaving the rider prone on the wet sidewalk while the horse stood erect like a man and struck at him with its forefeet And partly because that with recurrence of the picture her sense of irremediable violation increased and partly through irritation and anger with herself because it did, food choked her; she could not swallow it.
Later Aunt Sally sat and talked monotonously above her interminable fancy-work. Aunt Sally would never divulge what is was to be when completed, nor for whom, and she had been working on it for fifteen years, carrying always about with her a shapeless bag of dingy threadbare brocade containing odds and ends of colored fabric in all possible shapes. She could never bring herself to trim any of them to any pattern, so she shifted and fitted and mused and shifted them like pieces of a puzzle picture, trying to fit them to a pattern or to create a pattern about them without cutting them, smoothing her colored scraps on a card table with flaccid, patient putty-colored fingers, shifting and shifting them. From the bosom of her dress the needle Narcissa had threaded for her dangled its spidery skein,
Across the room Narcissa sat on her curled legs, with a book. Aunt Sally’s voice droned on with bland querulous interminability, and Narcissa turned the pages restively under her unseeing eyes. Suddenly she rose and laid the book down and crossed the hall into another room and sat in the half-light at her piano: But still between herself and the familiar keyboard the thunderous climacteric of the afternoon’s moment recurred and she saw his calm and bloodless face as a piece of flotsam unwelcome and too heavy to move, washed onto the grave unshadowed beach of her days, disrupting that serene constancy to which she clung so fiercely; and at last she rose with abrupt decision and went to the telephone.
Miss Jenny thanked her for her solicitude tardy, and dared to say that Bayard was all right, still an active member of the so-called human race, that is, since they had received no official word from the coroner. No, she had heard nothing of him since Loosh Peabody had ‘phoned her at four o’clock that Bayard was on his way home with a broken head. The broken head she readily believed, but the otherpart of the message she had put no credence in whatever, having lived with those damn Sartorises eighty years and knowing that home would be the last place in the world a Sartoris with a broken head would ever consider going. No, she was not even interested in his present whereabouts, and she hoped he hadn’t injured the horse? Horses were valuable animals.
Well, if Miss Jenny wasn’t alarmed, she certainly had no call to be, and she returned to the living room and explained to Aunt Sally whom she had been talking to and why, and drew a low chair to the lamp and picked up her book. She put the afternoon from her mind deliberately, and for a while and with a sort of detachment she watched her other self sink further and further into the book, until at last the book absorbed her attention. But then the vacuum of her relaxed will roused her again, and although she read deliberately on, a minor part of her consciousness probed ceaselessly, seeking the reason, until with a stabbing rush like a touched nerve it filled her mind again—the bronze fury of them, the child become an intent and voiceless automaton of fear, Bayard’s bleeding head chiseled and calm and cold. Then the long effort of thrusting him without her bastions again.
Aunt Sally fumbled her colored scraps together and returned them to their receptacle and rose and said goodnight and hobbled from the room. Narcissa sat and turned the pages on, hearing the other mount the stairs with measured laborious tappings of her ebony stick, and for a while longer she read with a mounting crescendo of nervous effort. For a paragraph or two, sometimes for a page, the book would absorb her; then again she would find her muscles tensing as she relived the afternoon. She flung the book away and returned to the piano again, determined to exorcise it, but Aunt Sally thumped on the floor overhead with her stick, and she desisted and returned to her discarded book. So it was with actual relief that she greeted Dr. Alford shortly after.
“I was passing and heard your piano” he said. “You haven’t stopped?”
She explained that Aunt Sally had gone to bed, and he sat formally and talked to her in his cultured pedantic voice on cold and erudite subjectsfor two hours. Then he departed and she stood in the door and watched him down the drive. The moon stood in the sky; along the drive cedars in a grave descending curve were pointed inkyandmotionless on the pale, faintly spangled sky, and upon the unstirring silver air the thin stringent odor of them lay like an exhalation.
