William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

This door was freshly painted and grained to represent walnut. Into the top half of it was let a pane of thick, opaque glass bearing a name in raised gilt letters, and two embracing office hours. Miss Jenny opened this door and Bayard followed her into a small cubbyhole of a room of spartan but suave asepsis. The walls were an immaculate new gray, with an engraved reproduction of a Corot and two spidery dry-points in narrow frames, and it contained a new rug in warm buff tones and a bare table and four chairs in fumed oak—all impersonal and clean and inexpensive, but revealing at a glance the proprietor’s soul; a soul hampered now by material strictures, but destined and determined to someday function in its proper surroundings—that of Persian rugs and mahogany or teak, and a single irreproachable print on the chaste wall. A young woman in a starched white dress rose from a smaller table in one corner, patting her hair.

“Good morning, Myrtle,” Miss Jenny said. “Tell Dr. Alford we’d like to see him, please.”

“You have an appointment?” the girl said in a voice without any inflection at all.

“We’ll make one now, then,” Miss Jenny replied. “You don’t mean to say Dr. Alford don’t come to work before ten o’clock, do you?”

“Dr. Alford don’t—doesn’t see anyone without an appointment,” the girl parroted, gazing at a point above their heads. “If you have no appointment, you’ll have to have an ap—”

“Tut, tut,” Miss Jenny interrupted briskly, “you run and tell Dr. Alford that Colonel Sartoris wants to see him, there’s a good girl.”

“Yessum, Miss Jenny,” the girl said obediently and she crossed the room, but at the further door she paused again and again her voice became parrot-like. “Won’t you sit down? I’ll see if the doctor is engaged.”

“You go and tell Dr. Alford we’re here,” Miss Jenny repeated affably. “Tell him I’ve got some shopping to do this morning.”

“Yessum, Miss Jenny,” the girl agreed, and disappeared, and after a dignified interval she returned, once more clothed faultlessly in her professional manner. The doctor will see you now. Come in, please,” she said, holding the door open and standing aside.

. “Thank you, honey,” Miss Jenny replied. “Is your mamma still in bed?”

“No’m, she’s sitting up now, thank you.”

“That’s good,” Miss Jenny agreed. “Come on, Bayard.”

This room was smaller than the other, and brutally carbolized, There was a white enameled cabinet filled with vicious nickel gleams, and a metal operating table and an array of electric furnaces and ovens and sterilizers. When they entered, the doctor in a linen jacket bent above a small desk, and for a while he proffered them his sleek oblivious profile. Thenhe glanced up, and rose.

He was in the youthful indeterminate thirties; a newcomer to the town and nephew of an old resident. He had made a fine record in medical school and was of a personable exterior, but there was a sort of preoccupied dignity, a sort of erudite and cold un-illusion regarding mankind, about him that precluded the easy intimacy of the small town and caused even those who remembered his visits during his boyhood to his aunt and uncle, to address him. as doctor or mister. He had a small moustache and a face like a reposeful mask—a comforting face, but cold; and while Bayard sat restively his dry scrubbed fingers probed delicately at the wen on the other’s face. Miss Jenny asked him a question, but he continued his delicate exploration raptly, as though he had not heard, as though she had not even spoken; inserting a small electric bulb, which he first sterilized, into Bayard’s mouth and snapping its ruby glow on and off withinhis cheek. Then he removed it and sterilized it again and returned it to the cabinet.

“Well?” Miss Jenny said impatiently. The doctor shut the cabinet deliberately and dried his hands and came and stood over them, and with his thumbs hooked in his jacket pockets he became solemnly and unctuously technical, rolling the harsh words from his tongue with an epicurean deliberation.

“It should be taken out at once,” he finished. “It doesn’t pain him now, and that is the reason I advise an immediate operation.”

“You mean, it might develop into cancer?” Miss Jenny asked.

“No question about it at all. Course of time. Neglect it, and I can promise you nothing; have it out now, and he need never worry about it.” He looked at Bayard again with lingering and chill contemplation. “It will be very simple. I will remove it as easily as that.” And he made a short gesture with his hand.

“What’s that?” Bayard demanded.

“I say, I can remove that growth so easily you won’t know it, Colonel Sartoris.”

“I’ll be damned if you do!” Bayard rose with one of his characteristic plunging movements.

“Sit down, Bayard,” Miss Jenny ordered. “Nobody’s going to cut on you without your knowing it. Should it be done right away?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am. I wouldn’t have that thing on my face overnight. Otherwise, it is only fair to warn you that I cannot assume responsibility for it...I could remove it in two minutes,” he added, looking at Bayard’s face again with cold speculation. Then he half turned his head and stopped in a listening attitude, and beyond the thin walls a voice in the other room boomed in rich rolling waves.

“Mawnin’, sister,” it said. “Didn’t I hear BayardSartoris cussin’ in here?” The doctor and Miss Jenny held their arrested attitudes, then the door surged open and the fattest man in Yocona county filled it. He wore a shiny alpaca coat over waistcoat and trousers of baggy impressed black broadcloth; above a plaited shirt the fatty rolls of his neck practically hid his low collar and a black string tie. His Roman senator’s head was covered with a vigorous curling of silvery hair. What the devil’s the matter with you?” he boomed, then: he sidled into the room, filling it completely, dwarfing its occupants and its furnishings.

This was Doctor Lucius Quintus Peabody, eighty-seven year? old and weighing three hundred and ten pounds and possessing a digestive tract like that of a horse. He had practiced medicine in Yocona county when a doctor’s equipment consisted of a saw and a gallon of whisky and a satchel of calomel; he had been John Sartoris’ regimental surgeon, and up to the day of the automobile he would start out at any hour of the twenty-four in any weather and for any distance, over practically impassable roads in a lopsided buckboard to visit anyone, white or black, who sent for him; accepting for fee usually a meal of corn pone and coffee or perhaps a small measure of corn or fruit, or a few flower bulbs or graftings. When he was young and hasty he had kept a daybook, kept it meticulously until these hypothetical assets totaled $10,000.00. But that was forty years ago, and since then he hadn’t bothered with a record at all; and now from time to time a countryman enters his shabby office and discharges an obligation, commemorating sometimes the payor’s entry into the world, incurred by his father or grandfather an4 which Dr. Peabody himself had long since forgotten about. Everyone in the county knew him, and it wassaid that he could spend the balance of his days driving about the county in the backboard he still used, with never a thought for board and lodging and without the expenditure of a penny for either. He filled the room with his bluff and homely humanity, and as he crossed the floor .and patted Miss Jenny’s back with one flail-like hand the whole building trembled to his tread.

“Mawnin’, Jenny,” he said. “Havin’ Bayard measured for insurance?”

“This damn butcher wants to cut on me,” Bayard said querulously. “You come on and make ‘em let me alone, Loosh.”