Flags in the Dust (39 page)

“Well, I dont know that I ever thought of it in exactly that way,” he answered gravely. “But I daresay you’re right, having femininity on your side.” He brooded himself, restlessly. “But I suppose it’s all sort of messy: living and seething corruption glossed over for a while by smoothly colored flesh; all foul, until the clean and naked bone.” He mused again, she quietly beside him. “But it’s something there, something you go after; must; driven. Not always swine. A plan somewhere, I suppose, known to Whoever first set the fermentation going. Perhaps it’s just too big to be seen, like a locomotive is a porous mongrel substance without edges to the grains of sand that give it traction on wet rails. Or perhaps He has forgotten Himself what the plan was.”

“But do you like to think of a woman who’ll willingly give up her child in order to marry another man a little sooner?”

“Of course I dont. But neither do I like to remember that I have exchanged you for Belle, or that she has red hair and is going to be fat someday, or that she has lain in another man’s arms and has a child that isn’t mine, even though she did voluntarily give it up. Yet there are any number of virgins who love children walking the world today, some of whom look a little like you, probably, and a modest number of which I allow myself to believe, without conceit, that I could marry. And yet.……” He struck another match to his pipe, but he let it go out again and sat forward in his chair, the pipe held loosely in his joined hands. “That may be the secret, after all. Not any subconscious striving after what we believe will be happiness, contentment; but a sort of gadfly urge after the petty, ignoble impulses which man has tried so vainly to conjure with words out of himself. Nature, perhaps, watching him as he tries to wean himself away from the rank and richly foul old mire that spawned him, biding her time and flouting that illusion of purifaction which he has foisted upon himself and calls his soul. But it’s something there, something you—you—” He brooded upon the fire, holding his cold pipe. She put her hand out and touched his, and he clasped it and looked at her with his groping and wide intensity. But she was gazing into the fire, her cheek in her palm, and she drew his hand to her and stroked it on her face.

“Poor Horry,” she said.

“Not happiness,” he repeated. “I’m happier now than I’ll ever be again. You dont find that, when you suddenly swap the part of yourself which you want least, for the half of someone else that he or she doesn’t want. Do you? Did you find it?”

But she only said “Poor Horry” again. She stroked his hand slowly against her cheek as she stared into the shaling ruby of the coals. The clock chimed again, with blent small silver bells. She spoke without moving.

“Aren’t you going back to the office this afternoon?”

“No.” His tone was again the grave, lightly casual one which he employed with her. “I’m taking a holiday. Next time you come, I may have a case and cant.”

“You never have cases: you have functions,” she answered. “But I dont think you ought to neglect your business,” she added with grave reproof.

“Neither do I,” he agreed. “But whatever else is business for, then?”

“Dont be silly.…… Put on some coal, Horry.”

But later he reverted again to his groping and tragic premonitions. They had spent the afternoon sitting before the replenished fire; later she had gone to the kitchen and made tea. The day still dissolved ceaselessly and monotonously without, and they sat and talked in a sober and happy isolation from their acquired ghosts, and again their feet chimed together upon the dark road and, their faces turned inward to one another’s, the sinister and watchful trees were no longer there. But the road was in reality two roads become parallel for a brief mile and soon to part again, and now and then their feet stumbled.

“It’s having been younger once,” he said. “Being dragged by time out of a certain day like a kitten from a tow sack, being thrust into another sack with shreds of the first one sticking to your claws. Like the burro that the prospector keeps on loading down with a rock here and a rock there until it drops, leaving him in the middle of his desert, surrounded by waiting buzzards,” he added, musing in metaphors. “Plunder. That’s all it is. If you could just be translated every so often, given a blank, fresh start, with nothing to remember. Dipped in Lethe every decade or so.……”

“Or every year,” she added. “Or day.”

“Yes.” The rain dripped and dripped, thickening the twilight;
the room grew shadowy. The fire had burned down again; its steady fading glow fell upon their musing faces and brought the tea things on the low table beside them, out of the obscurity in quiet rotund gleams; and they sat hand in hand in the fitful shadows and the silence, waiting for something. And at last it came: a thundering knock at the door, and they knew then what it was they waited for, and through the window they saw the carriage curtains gleaming in the dusk and the horses stamping and steaming on the drive, in the ceaseless rain.

Horace had seen her on the street twice, his attention caught by the bronze splendor of her hair and by an indefinable something in her air, her carriage. It was not boldness and not arrogance exactly, but a sort of calm, lazy contemptuousness that left him seeking in his mind after an experience lost somewhere within the veils of years that swaddled his dead childhood; an experience so sharply felt at the time that the recollection of it lingered yet somewhere just beneath his consciousness although the motivation of its virginal clarity was lost beyond recall. The wakened ghost of it was so strong that during the rest of the day he roused from periods of abstraction to find that he had been searching for it a little fearfully among the crumbled and long unvisited corridors of his mind, and later as he sat before his fire at home, with a book. Then, as he lay in bed thinking of Belle and waiting for sleep, he remembered it.

He was five years old and his father had taken him to his first circus, and clinging to the man’s hard, reassuring hand in a daze of blaring sounds and sharp cries and scents that tight
ened his small entrails with a sense of fabulous and unimaginable imminence and left him a little sick, he raised his head and found a tiger watching him with yellow and lazy contemplation; and while his whole small body was a tranced and soundless scream, the animal gaped and flicked its lips with an unbelievably pink tongue. It was an old tiger and toothless, and it had doubtless gazed through these same bars at decades and decades of Horaces, yet in him a thing these many generations politely dormant waked shrieking, and again for a red moment he dangled madly by his hands from the lowermost limb of a tree.

That was it, and though that youthful reaction was dulled now by the years, he found himself watching her on the street somewhat as a timorous person is drawn with delicious revulsions to gaze into a window filled with knives. He found himself thinking of her often, wondering who she was. A stranger, he had never seen her in company with anyone who might identify her. She was always alone and always definitely going somewhere; not at all as a transient, a visitor idling about the streets. And always that air of hers, lazy, predatory and coldly contemptuous. The sort of woman men stare after on the street and who does not even do them the honor of ignoring them.

The third time he saw her he was passing a store, a newly-opened department store, just as she emerged at that free, purposeful gait he had come to know. In the center of the door sill was a small iron ridge onto which the double doors locked, and she caught the heel of her slipper on this ridge and emerged stumbling in a cascade of small parcels, and swearing. It was a man’s bold swearing, and she caught her balance and stamped her foot and kicked one of her dropped parcels savagely into the gutter. Horace retrieved it and turning saw her stooping for the others, and together they gathered them
up and rose, and she glanced at him briefly with level eyes of a thick, dark brown and shot with golden lights somehow paradoxically cold.

“Thanks,” she said, without emphasis, taking the packages from him. “They ought to be jailed for having a mantrap like that in the door.” Then she looked at him again, a level stare without boldness or rudeness. “You’re Horace Benbow, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Yes, that is my name. But I dont believe——”

She was counting her packages. “One more yet,” she said, glancing about her feet. “Must be in the street.” He followed her to the curb, where she had already picked up the other parcel, and she regarded its muddy side and swore again. “Now I’ll have to have it rewrapped.”

“Yes, too bad, isn’t it?” he agreed. “If you’ll allow me——”

“I’ll have it done at the drug store. Come along, if you’re not too busy. I want to talk to you.”

She seemed to take it for granted that he would follow, and he did so, with curiosity and that feeling stronger than ever of a timorous person before a window of sharp knives. When he drew abreast of her she looked at him again (she was almost as tall as he) from beneath her level brows. Her face was rather thin, with broad nostrils. Her mouth was flat though full, and there was in the ugly distinction of her face an indescribable something; a something boding and leashed, yet untamed. Carnivorous, he thought. A lady tiger in a tea gown and remarking something of his thoughts in his face, she said: “I forgot: of course you dont know who I am. I’m Belle’s sister.”

“Oh, of course. You’re Joan. I should have known.”

“How? Nobody yet ever said we look alike. And you never saw me before.”

“No,” he agreed. “But I’ve been expecting for the last three
months that some of Belle’s kinfolks would be coming here to see what sort of animal I am.”

“They wouldn’t have sent me, though,” she replied. “You can be easy on that.” They went on along the street. Horace responded to greetings, but she strode on with that feline poise of hers; he was aware that men turned to look after her but in her air there was neither awareness nor disregard of it conscious or otherwise. And again he remembered that tiger yawning with bored and lazy contempt while round and static eyes stared down its cavernous pink gullet. “I want to stop here,” she said, as they reached the drug store. “Do you have to go back to the store, or whatever it is?”

“Office,” he corrected. “Not right away.”

“That’s right,” she agreed, and he swung the door open for her. “You’re a dentist, aren’t you? Belle told me.”

“Then I’m afraid she’s deceiving us both,” he answered drily. She glanced at him with her level, speculative gaze, and he added: “She’s got the names confused and sent you to the wrong man.”

“You seem to be clever,” she said over her shoulder. “And I despise clever men. Dont you know any better than to waste cleverness on women? Save it for your friends.” A youthful clerk in a white jacket approached, staring at her boldly; she asked him with contemptuous politeness to rewrap her parcel. Horace stopped beside her.

“Women friends?” he asked.

“Women what?” She stooped down, peering into a showcase of cosmetics. “Well, maybe so,” she said indifferently. “But I never believe ’em, though. Cheap sports.” She straightened up. “Belle’s all right, if that’s what you want to ask. It’s done her good. She doesn’t look so bad-humored and settled down, now. Sort of fat and sullen.”

“I’m glad you think that. But what I am wondering is, how you happened to come here. Harry’s living at the hotel, isn’t he?”

“He’s opened the house again, now. He just wanted somebody to talk to. I came to see what you look like,” she told him.

“What I look like?”

“Yes, to see the man that could make old Belle kick over the traces.” Her eyes were coldly contemplative, a little curious. “What did you do to her? I’ll bet you haven’t even got any money to speak of.”

Horace grinned a little. “I must seem rather thoroughly impossible to you, then,” he suggested.

“Oh, there’s no accounting for the men women pick out. I sometimes wonder at myself. Only I’ve never chosen one I had to nurse, yet.” The clerk returned with her package, and she made a trifling purchase and gathered up her effects. “I suppose you have to stick around your office all day, dont you?”

“Yes. It’s the toothache season now, you know.”

“You sound like a college boy now,” she said coldly. “I suppose Belle’s ghost will let you out at night, though?”

“It goes along too,” he answered.

“Well, I’m not afraid of ghosts. I carry a few around, myself.”

“You mean dripping flesh and bloody bones, dont you?” She looked at him again, with her flecked eyes that should have been warm but were not.

“I imagine you could be quite a nuisance,” she told him. He opened the door and she passed through it. And gave him a brief nod, and while he stood on the street with his hat lifted she strode on, without even a conventional Thank you or Goodbye.

That evening while he sat at his lonely supper, she telephoned him, and thirty minutes later she came in Harry’s car
for him. And for the next three hours she drove him about while he sat hunched into his overcoat against the raw air. She wore no coat herself and appeared impervious to the chill, and she carried him on short excursions into the muddy winter countryside, the car sliding and skidding while he sat with tensed anticipatory muscles. But mostly they drove monotonously around town while he felt more and more like a fatted and succulent eating-creature in a suave parading cage. Sometimes she talked, but usually she drove in a lazy preoccupation, seemingly utterly oblivious of him.

Later, when she had begun coming to his house, coming without secrecy and with an unhurried contempt for possible eyes and ears and tongues—a contempt that also disregarded Horace’s acute unease on that score, she still fell frequently into those periods of aloof and purring repose. Then, sitting before the fire in his living room, with the bronze and electric disorder of her hair and the firelight glowing in little red points in her unwinking eyes, she was like a sheathed poniard, like Chablis in a tall-stemmed glass. At these times she would utterly ignore him, cold and inaccessible. Then she would rouse and talk brutally of her lovers. Never of herself, other than to give him the salient points in her history that Belle had hinted at with a sort of belligerent prudery. The surface history was brief and simple enough. Married at eighteen to a man three times her age, she had deserted him in Honolulu and fled to Australia with an Englishman, assuming his name; was divorced by her husband, discovered by first hand experience that no Englishman out of his native island has any honor about women; was deserted by him in Bombay, and in Calcutta, she married again. An American, a young man, an employee of the Standard oil company. A year later she divorced him, and since then her career had been devious and a little obscure, due to her restlessness. Her family would know
next to nothing of her whereabouts, receiving her brief, infrequent letters from random points half the world apart. Her first husband had made a settlement on her, and from time to time and without warning she returned home and spent a day or a week or a month in the company of her father’s bitter reserve and her mother’s ready tearful uncomplaint, while neighbors, older people who had known her all her life, girls with whom she had played in pinafores and boys with whom she had sweethearted during the spring and summer of adolescence and newcomers to the town, looked after her on the street.