them and took a cigar from the humidor on the table beside his huge walnut bed, and he stood for a time with the cigar clamped between his teeth, having forgotten to light it Through the doth of his pocket his hand touched the pipe there, and he took it out and laid it on top of his chest of drawers. Then he quitted the room and banged the door behind him and tramped heavily down the stairs and out the backdoor.
Isom waked easily and untethered the mare and held the stirrup. He mounted and remembered the cigar at last and fired it Isom opened the gate into the lot and closed it, and trotted on ahead and opened the gate that let his master into the fieldbeyond, and closed that one. Bayard rode on, trailing his pungent smoke.
Elnora stood barelegged in the center of the kitchen floor and soused her mop into the pail and thumped it on the floor again.
2
Simon’s destination was a huge brick House set well up onto the street. The lot had been the site of a fine old colonial house which rose among magnolias and oaks and flowering shrubs. But the house had burned and some of the trees had been felled to make room for an architectural garbling so imposingly terrific as to possess a kind of chaotic majesty. It was a monument to the frugality (and the mausoleum of the social aspirations of his women) of a hillman who had moved in from a small settlement called Frenchman’s Bend and who, as Miss Jenny Du Pre put it, had built the handsomest house in Frenchman’s Bend on the most beautiful lot in Jefferson. The hillman had stuck it out for two years during which his womenfolks sat about the veranda all morning in lace-trimmed “boudoir caps” and spent the afternoons in colored silk riding through the streets in a new rubber-tired surrey; then the hillman sold his house to a newcomer in the town and took his women back to the country and doubtless set them to work again.
A number of motor cars ranked along the street lent a formally festive air to the place, and Simon with his tilted cigar stub wheeled up and drew rein and indulged in a brief colorful altercation with a negro sitting behind the wheel of a car parked before the hitching-block. “Don’t block off no Sartoris car’iage, black boy,” he added when the other had moved the motor and permitted Simon access to the post. “Block off de commonality, ef you wants, ‘but don’t intervoke no equipage waitin’ on Cunnelor Miss Jenny. Dey won’t stand for it.”
He descended and tethered the team, and his spirit mollified by the rebuke administered and laved with the beatitude of having gained his own way, Simon paused and examined the motor car with curiosity and no little superciliousness tinged faintly with envious awe, and spoke affably with its conductor. But not for long, for Simon had sisters in the Lord in this kitchen, and presently he let himself through the gate and followed the path that led around to the back. He could hear the party going on as he passed beneath the windows: that stained unintelligible gabbling with which white ladies could surround themselves without effort and which they seemed to consider a necessary (or unavoidable) adjunct to having a good time. The fact that it was a card party would have seemed neither paradoxical nor astonishing to Simon, for time and much absorbing experience had taught him a fine tolerance of white folks’ vagaries and for those of ladies of any color.
The hillman had built his house so close to the street that the greater part of the original lawn with its fine old trees lay behind it. There were once crepe-myrtle and syringa and lilac and jasmine bushes without order, and casual stumps and fences with honeysuckle overgrown; and after the originalhouse had burned these had taken the place and made of its shaggy formality a mazed and scented jungle loved of mockingbirds and thrushes, where boys and girls lingered on spring and summer nights among drifting fireflies and choiring whip-poor-wills. Then the hillman had bought it and cut some of the trees in order to build his house near the street after the country fashion, and chopped out the jungle of bushes and vines and whitewashed the remaining trees and ran his barn- and hog- and chicken-lot fences between their ghostly trunks. He didn’t remain long enough to learn of garages.
Some of the antiseptic desolation of his tenancy had faded now, and its present owner had set out more shrubbery—jasmine and mock-orange and verbena—with green iron tables and chairs beneath them and a pool and a tennis court; and Simon passed on with discreet assurance, and on a consonantless drone of female voices he rode into the kitchen where a thin woman in a funereal purple turban and poising a beaten biscuit heaped with a mayonnaise-impregnated something in a soiled kid glove, and a mountainous one in the stained apron of her calling and drinking melted ice-cream from a saucer, rolled their eyes at him.
“I seed him on de street yistiddy and he looked bad; he jes’ didn’t favor hisself,” the visitor was saying as Simon entered, but they dropped the theme of conversation immediately and made him welcome.
“Ef it ain’t Brother Strother,” they said in unison. “Come in, Brother Strother. How is you?”
“Po’ly, ladies; po’ly,” Simon replied. He doffed his hat and unclamped his cigar and stowed it away in the hat-band. “I’se had a right smart mis’ry in de back. Is y’allkep’well?”
“Right well, I thank you, Brother Strother,” thevisitor replied. Simon drew a chair up to the table, as he was bidden.
“What you gwine eat, Brother Strother?” the cook demanded hospitably. “Dey’s party fixin’s, and dey’s some cole greens and a little sof’ ice-cream lef’ f’um dinner.”
“I reckon I’ll have a little ice-cream and some of dem greens, Sis’ Rachel,” Simon replied. “My teef ain’t much on party doin’s no mo’.” The cook rose with majestic deliberation and waddled across to a pantry and reached down a platter. She was one of the best cooks in Jefferson: no mistress dared protest against the social amenities of Rachel’s kitchen.
“Ef you ain’t de beatin’es’ man!” the first guest exclaimed. “Eatin’ ice-cream at yo’ age!”
“I been eatin’ ice-cream sixty years,” Simon said. “Whut reason! got fer quittin’ now?”
“Dat’s right, Brother Strother,” the cook agreed, placing the dish before him. “Eat yo’ ice-cream when you kin git it Jes’ a minute and I’ll—Here, Meloney,” she interrupted herself as a young light negressJn a smart white apron and cap entered, bearing a tray of plates containing remnants of edible edifices copied from pictures in ladies’ magazines and possessing neither volume nor nourishment, with which the party had been dulling its palates against supper, “git Brother Strother a bowl of dat ‘ere icecream, honey.”
The girl clashed the tray into the sink and rinsed a bowl at the water tap while Simon watched her with
