about the hitching chains, and he could hear the footsteps and voices of people on the slow and unhurried pavement below the window; the people buying comfortable things to take home and eat at quiet tables. “You know she was all right.”
That night Horace went out to his sister’s, in a hired car; he did not telephone. He found Miss Jenny in her room. “Well,” she said. “Narcissa will—”
“I dont want to see her.” Horace said. “Her nice, well-bred young man. Her Virginia gentleman. I know why he didn’t come back.”
“Who? Gowan?”
“Yes; Gowan. And, by the Lord, he’d better not come back. By God, when I think that I had the opportunity —”
“What? What did he do?”
“He carried a little fool girl out there with him that day and got drunk and ran off and left her. That’s what he did. If it hadn’t been for that woman—And when I think of people like that walking the earth with impunity just because he has a balloon-tailed suit and went through the astonishing experience of having attended Virginia.……On any train or in any hotel, on the street; anywhere, mind you—”
“Oh,” Miss Jenny said. “I didn’t understand at first who you meant. Well,” she said. “You remember that last time he was here, just after you came? the day he wouldn’t stay for supper and went to Oxford?”
“Yes. And when I think how I could have—”
“He asked Narcissa to marry him. She told him that one child was enough for her.”
“I said she has no heart. She cannot be satisfied with less than insult.”
“So he got mad and said he would go to Oxford, where there was a woman he was reasonably confident he would not appear ridiculous to: something like that. Well.” She looked at him, her neck bowed to see across her spectacles. “I’ll declare, a male parent is a funny thing, but just let a man have a hand in the affairs of a female that’s no kin to him..……What is it that makes a man think that the female flesh he marries or begets might misbehave, but all he didn’t marry or get is bound to?”
“Yes,” Horace said, “and thank God she isn’t my flesh and blood. I can reconcile myself to her having to be exposed to a scoundrel now and then, but to think that at any moment she may become involved with a fool.”
“Well, what are you going to do about it? Start some kind of roach campaign?”
“I’m going to do what she said; I’m going to have a law passed making it obligatory upon everyone to shoot any man less than fifty years old that makes, buys, sells or thinks whiskey.…… scoundrel I can face, but to think of her being exposed to any fool.……”
He returned to town. The night was warm, the darkness filled with the sound of new-fledged cicadas. He was using a bed, one chair, a bureau on which he had spread a towel and upon which lay his brushes, his watch, his pipe and tobacco pouch, and, propped against a book, a photograph of his step-daughter, Little Belle. Upon the glazed surface a highlight lay. He shifted the photograph until the face came clear. He stood before it, looking at the sweet, inscrutable face which looked in turn at something just beyond his shoulder, out of the dead cardboard. He was thinking of the grape arbor in Kinston, of summer twilight and the murmur of voices darkening into silence as he approached, who meant them, her, no harm; who meant her less than harm, good God; darkening into the pale whisper of her white dress, of the delicate and urgent mammalian whisper of that curious small flesh which he had not begot and in which appeared to be vatted delicately some seething sympathy with the blossoming grape.
He moved, suddenly. As of its own accord the photograph had shifted, slipping a little from its precarious balancing against the book. The image blurred into the highlight, like something familiar seen beneath disturbed though clear water; he looked at the familiar image with a kind of quiet horror and despair, at a face suddenly older in sin than he would ever be, a face more blurred than sweet, at eyes more secret than soft. In reaching for it, he knocked it flat; whereupon once more the face mused tenderly behind the rigid travesty of the painted mouth, contemplating something beyond his shoulder. He lay in bed, dressed, with the light burning, until he heard the court-house clock strike three. Then he left the house, putting his watch and his tobacco pouch into his pocket.
The railroad station was three quarters of a mile away. The waiting room was lit by a single weak bulb. It was empty save for a man in overalls asleep on a bench, his head on his folded coat, snoring, and a woman in a calico dress, in a dingy shawl and a new hat trimmed with rigid and moribund flowers set square and awkward on her head. Her head was bent; she may have been asleep; her hands crossed on a paper-wrapped parcel upon her lap, a straw suit case at her feet. It was then that Horace found that he had forgot his pipe.
The train came, finding him tramping back and forth along the cinder-packed right-of-way. The man and woman got on, the man carrying his rumpled coat, the woman the parcel and the suit case. He followed them into the day coach filled with snoring, with bodies sprawled half into the aisle as though in the aftermath of a sudden and violent destruction, with dropped heads, open-mouthed, their throats turned profoundly upward as though waiting the stroke of knives.
He dozed. The train clicked on, stopped, jolted. He waked and dozed again. Someone shook him out of sleep into a primrose dawn, among unshaven puffy faces washed lightly over as though with the paling ultimate stain of a holocaust, blinking at one another with dead eyes into which personality returned in secret opaque waves. He got off, had breakfast, and took another accommodation, entering a car where a child wailed hopelessly, crunching peanut-shells under his feet as he moved up the car in a stale ammoniac odor until he found a seat beside a man. A moment later the man leaned forward and spat tobacco juice between his knees. Horace rose quickly and went forward into the smoking car. It was full too, the door between it and the jim crow car swinging open. Standing in the aisle he could look forward into a diminishing corridor of green plush seat-backs topped by hatted cannonballs swaying in unison, while gusts of talk and laughter blew back and kept in steady motion the blue acrid air in which white men sat, spitting into the aisle.
He changed again. The waiting crowd was composed half of young men in collegiate clothes with small cryptic badges on their shirts and vests, and two girls with painted small faces and scant bright dresses like identical artificial flowers surrounded each by bright and restless bees. When the train came they pushed gaily forward, talking and laughing, shouldering aside older people with gay rudeness, clashing and slamming seats back and settling themselves, turning their faces up out of laughter, their cold faces still toothed with it, as three middle-aged women moved down the car, looking tentatively left and right at the filled seats.
The two girls sat together, removing a fawn and a blue hat, lifting slender hands and preening not-quite- formless fingers about their close heads seen between the sprawled elbows and the leaning heads of two youths
