William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

THREE

1

Horace Benbow in his clean, wretchedly fitting khaki which but served to accentuate his air of fine and delicate futility, and laden with an astonishing impedimenta of knapsacks and kitbags and paper-wrapped parcels, got off the two-thirty train. His sister called to him across the tight clotting of descending and ascending passengers, and he roved his distraught gaze like a somnambulist rousing with an effort to avoid traffic, about the agglomerate faces. “Hello, hello,” he said, then he thrust himself clear and laid his bags and parcels on the edge of the platform and moved with intent haste up the train toward the baggage ear.

“Horace!” his sister called again, running after him. The station agent emerged from his office and stopped him and held him like a finely bred restive horse and shook his hand, and thus his sister overtook him. He turned at her voice and came completely from out his distraction and swept her up in his arms until her feet were off the ground, and kissed her on the mouth.

“Dear old Narcy,” he said, kissing her again. Then he set her down and stroked his hands on her face, as a child would. “Dear old Narcy,” he repeated, touching her face with his fine spatulate hands, gazing at her as though he were drinking that constant serenityof hers through his eyes. He continued to repeatDear old Narcy, stroking his hands on her face,utterly oblivious of his surroundings until she recalled him.

“Where in the world are you going, up this way?”

Then he remembered, and released her and rushed on, she following, and stopped again at the door of the baggage car, from which the station porter and a trainband were taking trunks and boxes as the baggage clerk tilted them out.

“Can’t you send down for it?” she asked. But he stood peering into the car, oblivious of her again. The two negroes returned and he stepped aside, still looking into the car with peering, birdlike motions of his head. “Let’s send back for it,” his sister said again.

“What? Oh. I’ve seen it every time I changed cars,” he told her, completely forgetting the sense of her words. “It’d be rotten luck to have it go astray right at my doorstep, wouldn’t it?” Again the negroes moved away with a trunk, and he stepped forward again and peered into the car. “That’s just about what happened to it; some clerk forgot to put it on the.train at M—. There it is,” he interrupted himself. “Easy now, cap,” he called in the country idiom, in a fever of alarm as the clerk slammed into the door a box of foreign shape and stenciled with a military address. “She’s got glass in her.”

“All right, colonel,” the baggage clerk agreed, “we ain’t hurt her none, I reckon. If we have, all you got to do is sue us.” The two negroes backed up to the door and Horace laid his delicate impractical hands on the box as the clerk tilted it expertly outward.

“Easy now, boys,” he repeated nervously, and he trotted beside them to the platform. “Set it down easy, now. Here, sis, lend a hand, will you?”

“We got it all right, cap’m,” the station porter said. “We ain’t gwine drop it,” But Horace continued to dab at it with his, hands, and as they set it down he leaned his head to it, listening. “She’s all right on de inside, ain’t she?”

“It’s all right,” the train porter assured him. He turned away. “Let’s go,” he called.

“I think it’s all right,” Horace agreed, his ear against the box, “I don’t hear anything. It’s packed pretty well” The engine blew two blasts and Horace sprang erect, digging into his pocket, and ran to the moving cars. The porter was just closing the vestibule, but he leaned down to Horace’s extended hand and straightened up and touched his cap. Horace returned to his box and gave another coin to the station porter. “Put it inside for me, careful, now. I’ll be back for it soon.”

“Yes, suh, Mr. Benbow. I’ll look out fer it”

“I thought it was lost, once,” he confided, dipping his arm inside his sister’s, and they retraced their steps toward the car. “It was delayed at Brest and didn’t come until the next boat. I had the first outfit I got—a small one—with me, and I pretty near lost that one, too. I was blowing a small one in my cabin on the boat one afternoon, when the whole thing, cabin and all, took fire. The captain decided that I’d better not try it again until we got ashore, with all the men on board. The vase turned out pretty well, though,” he babbled. “Lovely little thing. I’m catching on; I really am. Venice is a lovely place,” he added. “Must take you there, some day.” Then he squeezed her arm and fell to repeating Dear old Narcy, as though the homely sound of the nickname on his tongue was a taste he loved and had not forgotten. A few people still lingered about the station. Some of them spoke to him and he stopped to shaketheir hands, and a marine private with the Second Division Indian head on his shoulder remarked the triangle on Horace’s sleeve and made a vulgar sound of derogation through his pursed lips.

“Howdy, buddy,” Horace said, turning upon the other his shy startled gaze.

“Evenin’, general,” the marine answered. He spat, not exactly at Horace’s feet, and not exactly anywhere else. Narcissa clamped her brother’s arm against her side with her elbow.

“Do come on home and get into some decent clothes,” she said in a lower tone, hurrying him along.

“Get out of uniform?” he said. “I rather fancied myself in khaki,” he said, a little hurt “You really think I am ridiculous in this?” he asked quietly.

“Of course not,” she answered immediately, squeezing his hand. “I’m sorry I said that. You wear it just as long as you want to.”

“It’s a good uniform,” he said soberly. “People will realize that in about ten years, when noncombatants’ hysteria has worn itself out and the individual soldiers realize that the A.E.F. didn’t invent disillusion.”

“What did it invent?” she asked, holding his arm against her, surrounding him with the fond, inattentive serenity of her affection.

“God knows...Dear old Narcy,” he said again, and they crossed the side track and approached her car. “So you have dulled your palate for khaki.”

“Of course not,” she answered, shaking his arm a little. “You wear it just as long as you want to.” She opened the car door. Someone called after them-and they looked back and saw the porter trotting after them with Horace’s hand-luggage, which he had walked off and left lying on the platform.

“Oh, Lord,” Horace said, “I worry with it for fourthousand miles, then lose it on my own doorstep. Much obliged, Sol.”He extended his hands, but the porter came up and stowed the things in the car. “That’s the first outfit I got,” he added to his sister. “And the vase I blew on shipboard. I’ll show it to you when we get home.”

His sister got in under the wheel. “Where are your clothes? In the box?”

“I haven’t got any. Had to throw most of ‘em away to make room for the other stuff. No room for anything else.”

Narcissa looked at him for a moment with fond fretted annoyance. “What’s the matter?” he asked innocently. “Forget something yourself?”

“No. Get in. Aunt Sally’s waiting to see you.”

They drove on and mounted the shady gradual hill toward the square, and Horace looked about happily upon familiar quiet scenes. Some new tight little houses with minimum of lawn—homes built by country-bred people and set close to the street after the country fashion; occasionally a house going up on a lot that was vacant sixteen months ago when he went away. Other streets stretched away, shadier, with houses a little older and a little more imposing as they got away from the station’s vicinity; and pedestrians, usually old men bound townward after their naps, to spend the afternoon in grave futile absorptions.