tired. It was a shock, for she had never associated senility with Miss Jenny, who was so spare and erect and brusque and uncompromising and kind, looking after the place which was not hers and to which she had been transplanted when her own alien roots in a faraway place where customs and manners and even the very climate were different, had been severedviolently; running it with tireless efficiency and with the assistance of only a doddering old negro as irresponsible as a child.
But run the place she did, just as though old Bayard and young Bayard were there. But at night when they sat before tie fire in the office as the year drew on and the night air drifted in heavy again with locust and with the song of mockingbirds and with all the renewed and timeless mischief of spring and at last even Miss Jenny admitted that they no longer needed a fire; when at these times she talked, Narcissa noticed that she no; longer talked of her far off girlhood and of Jeb Stuart with his crimson sash and his garlanded bay and his mandolin, but always of atime no further back than Bayard’s and John’s childhood, as though her life were closing, not into the future, but out of the past, like a spool being rewound.
And as she would sit, serene again behind her forewarned and forearmed bastions, listening, she admired more than ever that indomitable spirit which, born with a woman’s body into a heritage of rash and heedless men and seemingly for the sole purpose of cherishing those men to their early and violent ends, and this over a period of history which had seen brothers and husband slain in the same useless mischancing of human affairs, had seen the foundations of her life vanish as in a nightmare not to be healed by either waking or sleep from the soil where her forbears slept trusting in the integrity of mankind, and had had her own roots torn bodily and violently from that soil—a period at which the men themselves, for all their headlong and scornful rashness, would have quailed had their parts been passive parts and their doom been waiting. And she thought how much finer that gallantry which never lowered lance to foes no sword could ever find, that uncomplaining steadfastness of those unsung (ay, unwept, too) women than the fustian and’ useless glamor of the men that theirs was hidden by. And now she is trying to make me one of them; to make of my child just another rocket to glare for a moment in the shy, then dieaway.
But she was serene again, and her days centered more and more as thetime drew nearer, and Miss Jenny’s voice was only a sound, comforting but without significance. Each week she got a whimsical, gallantly humorous letter from Horace: these she read too with serene detachment—what she could decipher, that is. She had always found Horace’swriting difficult, and parts that she could decipher meant nothing. Brit she knew that he expected that.
Then it was definitely spring again. Miss Jenny’s and Isom’s annual vernal altercation began, continued its violent but harmless course in the garden. They brought the tulip bulbs up from the cellar and set them out, Narcissa helping, and spaded up the other beds and unswaddled the roses and the transplanted jasmine. Narcissadrove into town, saw the first jonquils on the now deserted lawn, blooming as though she and Horace were still there, and later, the narcissi. But when the gladioli bloomed she was not going out any more save in the late afternoon or early evening, when she and Miss Jenny walked in the garden among burgeoning bloom and mockingbirds and belated thrushes where the long avenues of gloaming sunlight reluctant leaned, Miss Jenny still talking about Johnny; confusing the unborn with the dead.
Late in May they received a request for money from Bayard in San Francisco, where he had at last succeeded in being robbed. Miss Jenny sent it “You come on home “ she wired him, not telling Narcissa. “He’ll come home, now,” she did tell her. “You see if he don’t. If for nothing else than to worry us for a while.”
But a week later fie still had not come home, and Miss Jenny wired him again, a night letter, to the former address. But when the wire was dispatched he was in Chicago, and when it reached San Francisco he was sitting among saxophones and painted ladies and middle-aged husbands at a table littered with soiled glasses and stained with cigarette ash and spilt liquor, accompanied by a girl and two men. One of the men wore whipcord, with an army pilot’s silverwings on his. breast The other was a stocky man in shabby serge, with gray temples and intense, visionary eyes. The girl was a slim long thing, mostly legs apparently, with a bold red mouth and cold eyes, in an ultra-smart dancing frock; and when tile other two men crossed the room and spoke to Bayard she was cajoling him to drink with thinly concealed insistence. She and the aviator now danced together, and from time to time she looked back to where Bayard sat drinking steadily while the shabby man talked to him. She was saying: “Fm scared of him.”
The shabby man was talking with leashed excitability, using two napkins folded lengthwise into narrow strips to illustrate something, his voice hoarse and importunate against the meaningless pandemonium of the horns and drums. For. a while Bayard had half listened, staring at the man with his bleak chill eyes,but now he was watching something across the room, letting the man talk on, unminded. He was drinking whisky and soda steadily, with the bottle beside him. His hand was steady enough, but his face was dead white and he was quite drunk; and looking across at him from time to time, the girl was saying to her partner: “Tin scared, I tell you. God, I didn’t know what to do, when you and your friend came over. Promise you won’t go and leave us.”
“You seared?” the aviator repeated in a jeering tone, but he too glanced back at Bayard’s bleak arrogant face. “I bet you don’t even need a horse.”
“You don’t know him,” the girl rejoined, and she clutched his hand and struck her body shivering against his, and though his arm tightened and his hand slid down her back a little, it was under cover of the shuffling throng into which they were wedged, and a little warily, and he said quickly:
“Ease off, Sister: he’s looking this way. I saw himknock two teeth out of an Australian captain that just tried to speak to a girl he was with in a London joint two years ago.” They moved on until the band was across the room from them. “What’re you scared of? He’s not an Indian: he won’t hurt you as long as you mind your step. He’s all right. I’ve known him a long time, in places where you had to be good, believe me.”
“You don’t know,” she repeated, “I—” the music crashed to a stop; in the sudden silence the shabby man’s voice rose from the nearby table:
“—could just get one of these damn yellow-livered pilots to—” his voice was drowned again in a surge of noise, drunken voices and shrill woman-laughter and scraping chairs, but as they approached the table the shabby man still talked with leashed insistent gestures while Bayard stared across the room at whatever it was he watched, raising his glass steadily to his mouth. The girl clutched her partner’s arm.
“You’ve got to help me pass him out,” she begged swiftly. “I’m scared to leave with him, I tell you.”
“Pass Sartoris out? The man don’t wear hair, nor the woman either. Run back to kindergarten, Sister.” Then, struck with her sincerity, he said: “Say, what’s he done, anyway?”
“I don’t know. He’ll do anything. He threw an empty bottle at a traffic cop as we were driving out here. You’ve got—”
“Hush it,” he said. The shabby man ceased and raised his face impatiently. Bayard still gazed across the room.
“Brother-in-law over there,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully. “Don’t speak to family. Mad at us.” They turned and looked.
“Where?” the aviator asked. Then he beckoned a waiter. “Here, Jack.”
“Man with diamond headlight,” Bayard said, “Brave man. Can’t speak to him, though. Might hit me. Friendwith him, anyway.”
The aviator looked again. “Looks like his grandmother,” he said. He called the waiter again, then to the girl: “Another cocktail?” He picked up the bottle and filled his glass and reached it over and filled Bayard’s, and turned to the shabby man. “Where’s yours?”
