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 she could discern the dark silver shape of that doom which she had incurred, standing beside her chair, waiting and biding its time. No, no she whispered with passionate protest, surrounding her child with wave after wave of that strength which welled so abundantly within her as the days accumulated, manning the walls with invincible garrisons. She was even 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 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 severed violently; 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 a time 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 die away.
But she was serene again, and her days centered more and more as the time 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’s writing 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. Narcissa drove 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 silver wings 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.”