the street a huge misshapen machine like an antediluvian nightmare clattered and groaned. It dominated the scene with its noisy and measured fury, but against this as against a heroic frieze, the negroes labored on, their chanting and their motions more soporific than a measured tolling of faraway bells.
His arm was becoming numb, but the first mark— a water plug—where he changed hands for the first time, was still a hundred yards away; and when he reached it and swapped the crate to the other hand, his fingers were dead of all sensation and his biceps was jumping a little within his sleeve. Which goes toprove the fallacy of all theories of physical training. According to that, every succeeding Tuesday he should be able to go a littlefurther without changing, until by Christmas he would be able to carry the package all the way home without changing hands; and by Christmas ten years, all the way back to Gulfport, where they came from. Prize, maybe. More letters behind his name, anyway, C.S. Carrier of Shrimp. H. Benbow, M.A., Ll.D., C.S. … Thou wast happier …
The next mark was the corner where he turned, and he went on along the treeless street, between smug rows of houses identical one with another. Cheap frame houses, patently new, each with a garage and a car, usually a car that cost as much again as the house did. He reached the corner and changed hands again and turned into a smaller street, trailing spaced drops of melting ice behind him.
He lived on this street, and it was still open: motors could run on it, and he went on, dripping his trailing moisture along the sidewalk. With a motor car now, he could have ? Soon; perhaps next year; then things But naturally Belle would miss her car, after having had one always, a new one every year. Harry, and his passion for shiny wheels … which some would call generosity…“You lied to me. You told me you had plenty of money”… Lied …Lied took me away from my … Well, it would be better now, with little Belle. And Harry would find who functioned in movie subtitles, harshly: “What else do you want of mine? My damn blood?”
Man’s life. No apparent explanation for it save as an opportunity for doing things he’d spend the rest of it not being very proud of. Well, she had her child again, anyway, he told himself, thinking how women never forgive the men who permit them to do thethings which they later have any cause to regret; and remembering that day when, with little Belle’s awkwardly packed suitcase in the rack overhead and little Belle primly beside him in a state of demure and shining excitement at the prospect of moving suddenly to a new town, he had shrank into his corner like a felon until the familiar station and that picture of Harry’s ugly dogged head and his eyes like those of a stricken ox, were left behind, he wondered if little Belle too would someday ... But that last picture of Harry’s face had a way of returning. It’s only injured vanity, he argued with himself; he’s hurt in his own estimation because he couldn’t keep the female he had chosen in the world’s sight. But still his eyes and their patient bloodshot bewilderment, to be exorcised somehow. He’s a fool, anyway, he told himself savagely. And who has time to pity fools? Then he said God help us … God help us all … and then at last humor saved him and lie thought with a fine whimsical flash of it that probably Belle would send him to Harry next for a motor car.
Man’s very tragedies flout him. He has invented a masque for tragedy, given it the austerity which he believes the spectacle of himself warrants, and the thing makes faces behind his back; dead alone, he is not ridiculous, and even then only in his own eyes… Thou wast happier … A voice piped with thin familiarity from beyond a fence. It was little Belle playing with the little girls next door, to whom she had already divulged with thebland naivete of children that Horace was not her real daddy: he was just the one that lived with them how, because her real daddy’s name was Daddy and he lived in another town. It was a prettier town than, this, while the little girls listened with respect coldly concealed: little Belle had gained a sort of grudging cosmopolitanish glamor, what with her uniquely diversified family.
At the next gate he paused, and opened it and entered his rented lawn where his rented garage stared its empty door at him like an accusing eye, and still carrying his package carefully away from him he went on between the two spindling poplars he had set out and approached his rented frame house with its yellow paint and its naked veranda, knowing that from behind a shade somewhere, Belle was watching him. In negligee, the heavy mass of her hair caught up with studied carelessness, and her hot, suspicious eyesand the rich and sullen discontent of her mouth … Lied … Lied … took me away from my husband: what is to keep … The wild bronze flame of her hair … Her Injury, yes. Inexcusable because of the utter lack of necessity or reason for it. Giving him nothing, taking nothing away from him. Obscene. Yes, obscene: a deliberate breaking of the rhythm of things for no reason; to both Belle and himself an insult; to Narcissa, in her home where her serenity lingered grave and constant and steadfast as a diffused and sourceless light, it was an adolescent scribbling on the walls of a temple. Reason in itself confounded … If what parts can so remain...“I didn’t lie. I told you; did what she would not have had the cowardice to do.” What is to keep … Ay, obscene if you will, but there was about her a sort of gallantry, like a swordsman who asks no quarter and gives none; slays or is slain with a fine gesture or no gesture at all; tragic and austere and fine, with the wild bronze flame of her hair. And he, he not only hadn’t made a good battle; he hadn’t even made a decent ghost. Thou wast happier in thy cage, happier? Nor oceans and seas...
“She had ghosts in her bed,” Horace said, mountingthe steps.
In January his aunt received a post card from Bayard mailed at Tampico; a month later, from Mexico City, a wire for money. And that was the last intimation he gave that he contemplated being at any stated place long enough for a communication to reach him, although from time to time he indicated by gaudy postals where he had been, after the bleak and brutal way of him. In April the card came from Rio, followed by an interval during which he seemed to have completely vanished and which Miss Jenny and Narcissa passed quietly at home, their days centered placidly about the expected child, which Miss Jenny had already named John. Miss Jenny felt that old Bayard had somehow flouted them all, had committed lese majesty toward his ancestors and the lusty glamor of the family doom by dying, as she put it, practically from the “inside put.” Thus he was in something like bad odor with her, and asyoung Bayard was in more or less suspense, neither flesh nor fowl, she fell to talking more and more of John, Soon after old Bayard’s death, in a sudden burst of rummaging and prowling which she called winter cleaning, she had found among his mother’s relics a miniature of John done by a New Orleans painter when John and Bayard were about eight Miss Jenny remembered that there had been one of each and it seemed to her that she could remember putting them both away together when their mother died. But the other she could not find. So she left Simon to gather up the litter she had made and brought the miniature downstairs to where Narcissa sat in the “office” and together they examined it.
The hair even at that early time was of a rich tawny shade, and rather long, “I remember that first day,” Miss Jenny said, “when they came home from school Bloody as hogs, both of ‘em, from fighting other boys who said they looked like girls. Their mother washed ‘em and petted ‘em, but they were so busy bragging to Simon and Bayard about the slaughter they had done to mind it much. ‘You ought to seen the otters,’ Johnny kept saying. Bayard blew up, of course; said it was a damn shame to send a boy out with, curls down his back, and finally he bullied the poor woman into agreeing to let Simon barber ‘em. And do you know what? Neither of ‘em would let his hair be touched. It seems they hadn’t licked all the enemy yet, and they were going to make the whole school admit that they could wear hair down to their heels, if they wanted to. And I reckon they did, because after two or three days there wasn’t any more blood on ‘em, and then they let Simon cut it off while their mother sat behind the piano in the parlor and cried. And that was the last of it.”
The face was a child’s face, and it was Bayard’s too, yet there was already in it, not that bleak arrogance she had come to know in Bayard’s, but a sort of frank spontaneity, warm and ready and generous; and as Narcissa held the $mall oval in her hand while the steady blue eyes looked quietly back at her and from the whole face among its tawny curls, with its smooth skin and child’s mouth, there shone like a serene radiance something sweet and merry and wild, she realized as she never had before the blind tragedy of human events. And while she sat motionless with the medallion in her hand and Miss Jenny thought she was looking at it, she was cherishing the child under her own heart with all the aroused constancy of her nature: it was as though already shecould discern the dark silver shape of that doomwhich she had incurred, standing beside her chair,waiting and biding its time. No, no she whisperedwith passionate protest, surrounding her child withwave after wave of that strength which welledsoabundantly within her as the days accumulated,manning the walls with invincible garrisons. She waseven glad Miss Jenny had shown her the thing: she was now forewarned as well as forearmed.
Meanwhile Miss Jenny continued to talk about the child as Johnny and to recall anecdotes of that other John’s childhood, until at last Narcissa realized that Miss Jenny was getting the two confused; and with a sort of shock she knew that Miss Jenny was getting old, that at last even her indomitable old heart was growing a little
