One of the dogs was quite old and nearly blind. It spent most of the day lying in the sun in the backyard, or during the hot summer days, in the cool dusty obscurity beneath the kitchen floor. But toward the middle of the afternoon it went to the front of the house and waited there quietly until it heard the carriage coming up the drive, and when Bayard Sartoris had descended and passed into the house it returned to the back and waited again until Isom led the mare up to the back porch and Bayard Sartoris came out and mounted. Then together they spent the afternoon going quietly and unhurriedly about the grazing meadows and the planting or harvesting fields and the peaceful woodlands in their dreaming seasonal mutations—the man on his horse and the ticked setter gravely beside him, while the descending evening of their fives drew toward its peaceful close upon the kind land that had bred them both. The other dog was a two-year-old; his net was too hasty for the sedateness of their society overlong, and though at times he set forth with them or came quartering up, splashed and eager, from somewhere to join them in mid procession, he never remained very long but must presently dash away with lolling tongue and the tense delicate feathering of his tail in pursuit of the maddening elusive smells with which the world surrounded him and tempted him from beyond every thicket and copse and ravine,
Bayard Sartoris1 boots were wet to the tops and the soles were rimmed with mud, and he bent in intense preoccupation above his keg and bottle under the sober curiosity of the two dogs. The keg was propped in another chair with the bung upward and he was siphoning the rich liquor delicately into the decanter through a slender rubber tube. Miss Jenny came straight through the house and, entered the library with her black bonnet still perched on the exact top of her trim white head, and the two dogs looked up at her, the older with grave dignity, the younger one more quickly, tapping his tail on the floor with fawning diffidence. But Bayard Sartoris did not raise his head. Miss Jenny closed the door and gazed coldly at his boots.
“Your feet are wet,” she stated. Still he didn’t look up, but held the tube delicately in the bottle-neck, watching the clear brown liquor mount steadily in the decanter. At times Bayard Sartoris’ deafness was very convenient, more convenient than actual, perhaps; but who could know this certainly? “You go upstairs and get those boots off,” Miss Jenny commanded, coming into the room. “I’ll fill the decanter.”
But within the walled serene tower of his deafness his rapt imperturbability did not falter until the decanter was full and he pinched the tube shut and raised it to drain back into the keg. The older dog sat gravely before him, but the younger one had retreated beyond him, where it lay motionless and alert, its head on its crossed forepaws, watching Miss Jenny with one melting unwinking eye. Bayard Sartoris drew the tube from the keg and looked at his aunt for the first time. “What did you say?”
But Miss Jenny had returned and opened the door again and she shouted into the hall, eliciting an alarmed response from the kitchen, followed presently by Simon in the flesh. “Go up and get Colonel’s slippers,” she directed. When she turned into the room again neither her nephew nor the keg was visible, but from the open closet door there protruded the young dog’s interested hind quarters and the tense feathering of his barometric tail; then Bayard Sartoris thrust, the dog out of the closet with his foot and emerged himself and locked the door behind him.
“Has Simon come in yet?” he asked.
“He’s coming right now,” she answered. “I just called him. Sit down and get those wet boots off,” At that moment Simon entered, with the slippers, and Bayard Sartoris sat obediently; and Simon knelt and drew his boots off under Miss Jenny’s martinet eye. “Are his socks dry?” she asked.
“No’m, dey ain’t wet,” Simon answered. But she bent and felt them herself.
“Here,” said her nephew testily, but Miss Jenny ran her hand over both his feet with bland imperturbability.
“Precious little fault of his, that they ain’t,” she said across the topless wall of his deafness. “And then you have to come along with that fool yarn of yours about Mr. Bayard.”
“Section han’ seed him,” Simon repeated stubbornly, thrusting the slippers onto Bayard Sartoris’ feet. “I ain’t never said I seed him.” He stood up and rubbed his hands on his thighs.
Bayard Sartoris stomped his feet into the slippers. “Bring the toddy fixings Simon.” Then to his aunt, in a casual tone: “Simon says Bayard got off the train this afternoon.” But Miss Jenny was storming at Simon again.
“Come back here and get these boots and set ‘em behind the stove,” she added. Simon returned and sidled swiftly to the hearth and gathered up the boots. “And take these dogs out of here, too,” she said. “Thank the Lord Bayard hasn’t thought about bringing his horse in here, too.” Immediately the old dog came to his feet, and followed by the younger one’s diffident alacrity, departed with that same assumed deliberation with which both Bayard Sartoris and Simon obeyed Miss Jenny’s implacable will.
“Simon says—” Bayard Sartoris repeated.
“Simon says fiddlesticks!” Miss Jenny snapped. “Have you lived with Simon sixty years without learning that he don’t know the truth when he sees it?” And she followed Simon from the room and on to the kitchen, and while Simon’s tall yellow daughter bent over her biscuit-board and Simon filled a glass pitcher with fresh water and sliced lemons and set them and a sugar bowl and two tall glasses on a tray, Miss Jenny stood in the doorway and curled what remained of Simon’s grizzled hair to tighter kinks yet. She had a fine command of language at all times, but when her ire was aroused she soared without effort to sublime heights. Hers was a forceful clarity and a colorful simplicity which Demosthenes would have envied and that even mules comprehended and of whose intent the most obtuse persons remained not long unawares; and beneath it Simon’s head bobbed lower and lower and the fine assumption of detached preoccupation moulted like feathers from about his defenseless self, until he caught up the tray and ducked from the room. Miss Jenny’s voice followed him, descending easily with a sweeping comprehensiveness that included a warning and a suggestion for future conduct for Simon and Elnora, and all their descendants actual and problematical, for some years.
“And the next time,” Miss Jenny finished, “you or any section hand or brakeman or delivery boy either sees or hears anything you think will be of interest to Colonel you tell me about it first: I’ll do all the telling after that.” She gave Elnora another glare for good measure and returned to the library, where her nephew was stirring sugar and water carefully in the two glasses.
Simon in a white jacket officiated as butler—doubled in brass, you might say, only it was not brass, but silver so fine that some of the spoon handles were worn now almost to paper thinness where fingers in their generations had held them; silver which Simon’s grandfather Joby had buried on a time beneath the ammoniac bam floor while Simon, aged three in a single filthy garment, had looked on with a child’s grave interest in the curious game.
An effluvium of his primary calling dung about him always, even when he was swept and garnished for church and a little shapeless in a discarded Prince Albert coat of Bayard Sartoris’; and his every advent into the dining room with dishes brought with him, and the easy attitudes into which he fell near the buffet while answering Miss Jenny’s abrupt questions or while pursuing some fragmentary conversation which he and Bayard Sartoris had been engaged in earlier in the day disseminated, and his exits left behind him a faint nostalgia of the stables. But tonight he brought dishes in and set them down and scuttled immediately back to the kitchen: Simon realized that again he had talked too much.