LIEUT. JOHN SARTORIS, R.A.F.
Killed in action, July 19, 1918.
‘I bare him on eagle’s wings
and brought him unto Me’
A faint breeze soughed in the cedars like a long sigh and the branches moved gravely in it. Across the spaced tranquility of the marble shapes the doves crooned their endless rising inflections. Isom retained for another armful of withered flowers and bore it away.
Old Bayard’s headstone was simple too, having been born, as he had, too late for one war and too soon for the next one, and she thought what a joke They had played on him: denying him opportunities for swashbuckling and then denying him the privilege of being buried by men who would have invented vainglory for him. The cedars had almost overgrown his son John’s and John’s wife’s, graves. Sunlight reached them only in fitful splashes, dappling the weathered stone with brief stipplings; only with difficulty could the inscription have been deciphered. But she knew what it would be, what with the virus, the inspiration and the example of that one which dominated them all, which gave to the whole place in which weary people were supposed to rest, a hushed, orotund solemnity having no more to do with mortality than the bindings of books have to do with that of the characters, and beneath which the headstones of the wives whom they had dragged into their arrogant orbits were, despite their pompous genealogical references, modest and effacing as the song of thrushes beneath the eyrie of an eagle.
He stood on a stone pedestal, in his frock coat and bareheaded, one leg slightly advanced and one hand resting lightly on the stone pylon beside him. His head was lifted a little in that gesture of haughty arrogance which repeated itself generation after generation with a fateful fidelity, his back to the world and his carven eyes gazing out across the valley where his railroad ran and beyond it to the blue changeless hills, and beyond that The pedestal and effigy were mottled with sessions of rain and sun and with drippings from the cedar branches, and the bold carving of the letters was bleared with mold, yet easily decipherable:
COLONEL JOHN SARTORIS, CSA
1823 - 1876
Soldier, Statesman, Citizen of the World
For marts enlightenment he lived
By man’s ingratitude he died
Pause here, son of sorrow; remember death.
This inscription had caused some furor on the part of the slayer’s family, and a formal protest followed. But in complying with opinion, old Bayard had his revenge: he caused the line ‘by man’s ingratitude he died’ to be chiseled crudely out and added beneath it: ‘Fell at the hand of —— Redlaw, Aug, 4, 1876.’
Miss Jenny stood for a time, musing, a slender, erect figure in black silk and a small uncompromising black bonnet. The wind drew among the cedars in long sighs, and steadily as pulses the sad hopeless reiteration of the doves came along the sunny air. Isom returned for the last armful of dead flowers, and looking out across the marble vistas where shadows of noon moved, she watched a group of children playing quietly and a little stiffly in their bright Sunday finery, among the tranquil dead. Well, it was the last one, at last, gathered in solemn conclave about the dying reverberation of their arrogant lusts, their dust moldering quietly beneath the pagan symbols of their vainglory and the carven gestures of it in enduring stone; and she .remembered something Narcissa had said once, about a world without men, and wondered if therein lay peaceful avenues and dwellings thatched with quiet; and she didn’t know.
Isom returned, and as she turned away Dr. Peabody called her name. He was dressed as usual in his shabby broadcloth trousers and his shiny alpaca coat and a floppy panama hat, and his son was with him.
“Well, boy,” Miss Jenny said, giving young Loosh her hand. His face was big-boned and roughly molded. He had a thatch of straight, stiff black hair and his eyes were steady and brown and his mouth was large; and in all his ugly face there was reliability and gentleness and humor. He was rawboned and he wore his clothing awkwardly, and his hands were large and bony and with them he performed delicate surgical operations with the deftness of a hunter skinning a squirrel and the celerity of a prestidigitator. He lived in New York, where he was associated with a surgeon whose name was a household word, and once a year and sometimes twice he rode thirty-six hours on the train, spent twenty hours with his father (which they passed walking about the town or riding over the countryside in the sagging buck-board all day, and sitting on the veranda or before the fire all the following night), took the train again and ninety-two hours later, was at his clinic again. He was thirty years old, only child of the woman Dr. Peabody had courted for fourteen years before he Was able to marry her. The courtship was during the days when he physicked and amputated the whole county by buckboard; often after a year’s separation he would drive thirty miles to see her, to be met on the way and deflected to a childbed or a mangled limb, with only a scribbled message to assuage the interval of another year, “So you’re home again, are you?” Miss Jenny asked.
“Yes, ma’am. And find you as spry and handsome as ever.”
“Jenny’s too bad-tempered to ever do anything but dry up and blow away,” Dr. Peabody said.
“You’ll remember I never let you wait on me, when I’m not well,” she retorted. “I reckon you’ll be tearing off again on the next train, won’t you?” she asked young Loosh.
“Yessum, I’m afraid so. My vacation hasn’t come due, yet.”
‘Well, at this rate you’ll spend it at an old men’s home somewhere. Why don’t you all come out and have dinner, so he can see the boy?”
“I’d like to,” young Loosh answered, “but I don’t have time to do all the things I want to, so I just make up my mind not to do any of ‘em. Besides, I’ll have to spend this afternoon fishing” he added.
“Yes,” his father put in, “and choppin’ up good fish with a pocket knife just to see what makes ‘em go. Lemme tell you what he did this mawnin’: he grabbed that old lame hound of Abe’s and operated on its shoulder so quick that Abe not only didn’t know what he was doing, but even the dawg didn’t. Only you forgot to look for his soul,” he added.
“You don’t know if he hasn’t got one,” young Loosh said, unruffled. “Dr. Straud is trying to find the soul by electricity; he says—”
“Fiddlesticks,”Miss Jenny snapped. “You better get a jar of Will Falls’ salve and give it to him, Loosh. Well—” she glanced at the sun “—I’d better be going. If you won’t come out to dinner—?”
“Thank you, ma’am,” young Loosh answered. His father said:
“I brought him in to show him that collection of yours. We didn’t know we looked that underfed.”
“Help yourself,” Miss Jenny answered. She went on, and they stood and watched her trim back until it passed from view.
“And now there’s another one,” young Loosh said musingly. “Another one to grow up and keep his folks in a stew until he finally succeeds in doing what they all expect of him. Well, maybe that Benbow blood will sort of hold him down. They’re quiet folks, that girl; .and Horace sort of...and just women to raise him...”
Dr. Peabody grunted. “He’s got Sartoris blood in him, too.”
All of Narcissi’s instincts had been antipathetic to him; his idea was a threat and his presence a violation of the very depths of her nature: in the headlong violence of him she had been like a lily in a gale which rocked it to its roots in a sort of vacuum, without any actual laying-on of hands. And now the gale had gone on; the lily had forgotten it as its fury died away into fading vibrations of old terrors and dreads, and the stalk recovered and the bell itself was untarnished save by the friction of its own petals. The gale is gone, and though the lily is sad a little with vibrations of ancient fears, it is not sorry.