She had her meal in lonely state in the sombre dining room while Simon, having dispatched Bayard’s tray by Isom, moved about the table and pressed dishes upon her with bland insistence or leaned against the sideboard and conducted a rambling monologue that seemed to have had no beginning and held no prospect of an end. It still flowed easily behind her as she went up the hall; as she stood in the door it was still going on, volitionless, as though entranced with its own existence and feeding on its own momentum. The salvia bed lay in an unbearable glare of white light, in clamorous splashes. Beyond it the drive shimmered with heat until, arched over with locust and oak, it descended in a cool green tunnel to the gates and the sultry ribbon of the highroad. Beyond the road fields stretched away shimmering, broken here and there by motionless clumps of trees, on to the hills dissolving bluely behind the July haze.
She leaned for a while against the door, in her white dress, her cheek against the cool, smooth plane of the jamb, in a faint draft that came steadily from somewhere, though no leaf stirred. Simon had finished in the dining room and a drowsy murmur of voices came up the hall from the kitchen, borneupon a thin stirring of air too warm to be called a breeze and upon which not even the cries of birds came.
At last she heard a movement from above stairs and she remembered Isom with Bayard’s tray, and she turned and did the parlor door ajar and entered. The shades were drawn closely, and the crack of light that followed her but deepened the gloom. She found the piano and stood beside it for a while, touching its dusty surface and thinking of Miss Jenny erect and indomitable in the gloom beside it. She heard Isom descend the stairs; soon his footsteps died away down the hall, and the drew out the bench and sat down and laid her arms along the closed lid.
Simon entered the dining room again, mumbling to himself and followed presently by Elnora, and they clashed dishes and talked again with a mellow rise and fall of consonantless and indistinguishable words. Then they went away, but still she sat with her arms along the cool wood, in the dark quiet room where even time stagnated a little.
The clock rang again, and she moved. I’ve been crying, she thought. “I’ve been
Bayard lay as she had left him. He was smoking a cigarette now. Between puffs he dabbed it casually at a saucer on the bed beside him. “Well?” he said.
“You’re going to set the house on fire that way,” she told him, removing the saucer. “You know Miss Jenny wouldn’t let you do that.”
“I know it,” he agreed, a little sheepishly, and she dragged the table over and set the saucer on it.
“Can you reachit now?”
“Yes, thanks. Did they give you enough to eat?”
“Oh, yes. Simon’s very insistent, you know. Shall Iread some more, or had you rather sleep?”
“Read, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay awake, thistime.”
“Is that a threat?” He looked at her quickly as she seated herself and took up the book.
“Say, what happened to you?” he demanded. “You acted like you were all in before dinner. Simon give you a drink, or what?”
“No, not that bad.” And she laughed, a little wildly, and opened the book. “I forgot to mark the place,” she said, turning the pages swiftly.“Do you remember—No, you were asleep. Shall I go back to where you stopped listening?”
“No, just read anywhere. It’s all about alike, I guess. If you’ll move a little nearer, I believe I can stayawake.”
“Sleep, if you want to. I don’t mind,” she answered.
“Meaning you won’t come any nearer?” he asked, watching her with his bleak gaze. She moved her chair nearer and opened the book again and turned the pages on, slowing and scanning them.
“I think it was about here,” she said, with indecision. “Yes.” She read to herself for a line or two, then she began aloud, read to the end of the page, where her voice trailed off and she creased her brow; turned the nest page then flipped it back. “I read this once; I remember it now.” And she turned onward again, with frowning indecision. “I must have been asleep too,” she said, and she glanced at him with ludicrous and friendly bewilderment. “I seem to have read pages and pages...”
“Oh, begin anywhere,” he repeated.
“No: wait; here it is.” She read again, and he lay watching her. At times she raised her eyes swiftly and found his eyes upon her face, bleakly but quietly. After a while he was no longer watching her, and at last, finding that his eyes were closed, she thought he slept. She finished the chapter and stopped
“No,” he said drowsily. “Not yet.” Then, when she failed to resume, he opened his eyesand asked for a cigarette. She laid the book aside and struck a match for him, then picked up the book again.
So the afternoon wore away. The negroes had gone, and no sound was in the house save that of her voice, arid the clock at quarter hour intervals; outside the shadows slanted more and more, peaceful harbingers of evening. Bayard was asleep now, despite his contrary conviction, and after a while she ceased and laid the book away. The long shape of him lay stiffly in its cast beneath the sheet, and she examined his bold immobile face with a little shrinking and yet with fascination, and her own patient and hopeless sorrow overflowed (there was enough of it to anneal the world) in pity for him. He was so utterly without any affection for any place or person or thing at all; too—too...hard (no, that’s not the word—but cold eluded her; she could comprehend hardness, but not coldness) to find relief by crying, even. Better to have lost it^ than never to have had it at all, at all.
The afternoon drew on; evening was finding itself. She sat musing and still and quiet, gazing out of the window where no wind yet stirred the leaves, as though she were waiting for someone to tell her what to do next, and she lost all account of time other than as a dark unhurrying stream into whichshe gazed until the mesmerism of water conjured the water itself away. Lost, lost; yet never to have had itstall...
He made an indescribable sound, and she turned her head quickly and saw his body straining terrifically in its cast, and his clenched hands and the snarl of his teeth beneath his lifted lip, and as she sat blanched and incapable of further movement he made the sound again. His breath hissed between his teeth and he screamed, a wordless sound that sank into a steady violence of profanity; and when she rose at last and stood over him with her
