William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

“Since when have I been a public benefactor?” Belle rejoined coldly. Horace grinned faintly. Mrs. Marderssaid:

“Now, Belle, we all know how kindhearted you are; don’t try to conceal it.”

“I said a public benefactor,” Belle repeated. Horace said quickly:

“Well, Harry would swap a handmaiden for an ox, any day. At least, he can save a lot of wear and tear on his cellar, not having to counteract your tea in a lot of unrelated masculine tummies. I suppose there’ll be no more tea out here, will there?”

“Don’t be silly,” Belle said.

Horace said: “I realize now that it is not tennis thatI came here for, but for the incalculable amount of uncomfortable superiority I always get when Meloney serves me tea...I saw your daughter as I came along,” he added

“She’s somewhere around, I suppose,” Belle agreedindifferently. “You haven’t had your hair cut yet,”she stated. “Why is it that men have no sense aboutbarbers?” she addressed the other two. The olderwoman watched them brightly, coldly across hertwo flaccid chins. The young girl sat quietly in hersimple virginal white, her racket on her lap and onebrown hand lying upon it like a sleeping tan puppy.She was watching Horace with sober interest butwithout rudeness, as children do. ‘They either won’tgo to the barber at all, or they insist on having their

heads all gummed up with pomade and things, ” Belle added.

“Horace is a poet,” the other woman said in an ad-monitory tone. Her flesh draped loosely from her cheek-bones like rich, slightly soiled velvet; her eyes were like the eyes of an old turkey, mucous and predatory and unwinking. “Poets must be excused for what they do. You should remember that, Belle.” Horace bowed in her direction.

“Your race never fails intact, Belle,” he said. “Mrs. Marders is one of the few people I know who give the law profession its true evaluation.”

“It’s like any other business, I suppose,” Belle said. “You are late today. Why didn’t Narcissa come?”

“I mean, dubbing me a poet,” Horace explained. “The law, like poetry, is the final resort of the lame, the halt, the imbecile and the blind. I dare say Caesar invented the law business to protect himself against poets.”

“You’re so clever,” Belle said. The young girl spoke suddenly:

“Why do you bother about what men put on their hair, Miss Belle? Mr. Mitchell’s bald.”

The other woman laughed, unctuously, steadily, watching them with her lidless unlaughing eyes. She watched Belle and Horace and still laughed steadily, brightly and cold. “‘Out of the mouths of babes—’” she quoted. The young girl glanced from one to another with her clear sober eyes. She rose.

“I guess I’ll see if leant get a set now,” she said.

Horace moved also. “Let’s you and I—”he began. Without turning her head Belle touched him with her hand.

“Sit down, Frankie,” She commanded. “They haven’t finished the game yet. You shouldn’t laugh so much on an empty stomach,” she told the other woman. “Do sit down, Horace.”

The girl still stood with slim and awkward grace, holding her racket She looked at Belle a moment, then she turned her head toward the court again. Horace took the chair beyond Belle; her hand dropped hidden into his, with that secret movement, then it grew passive; it was as though she had turned a current off somewhere. Like one entering a dark room in search of something, finding it and pressing the light off again.

“Don’t you like poets, Frankie?” Horace asked across Belle’s body.

“They can’t dance,” the girl answered, without turning her head. “I guess they are all right, though. They went to the war, the good ones did. There was one was a good tennis player, that got killed. I’ve seen his picture, but I don’t remember his name.”

“Oh, don’t start talking about the war, for heaven’s sake,” Belle said. Her hand stirred in Horace’s but did not withdraw. “I had to listen to Harry for twoyears. Explaining why he couldn’t go. As if I cared whether he did or not.”

“He had a family to support,”Mrs. Marders suggested brightly. Belle half reclined, her head againstthe chair-back, her hidden hand moving slowly inHorace’s, exploring, turning, ceaselessly like a separate volition curious but without warmth.

“Some of them were aviators,” the girl continued.She now turned the pages of the magazine upon the table. She stood with one little unemphatic hipbraced against the table-edge, her racket clasped beneath her arm. Then she dosed the magazine andagain she watched the two figures leanly antic uponthe court. “I danced with one of those Sartoris boysonce. I was too scared to know which one it was. I wasn’t anything but a baby, then.”

“Were they poets?” Horace asked. “I mean, the one thatgot back. I know the other one, the dead one, was.”

“He sure can drive that car of his,” she answered, still watching the game, her straight hair (hers was the first bobbed head in town) not brown not gold, her brief nose in profile, her brown still hands clasping her racket. Belle stirred and freed her hand.

“Do go on and play, you all,” she said.“You make me nervous.” Horace rose with alacrity.

“Come on, Frankie,” he said. “Let’s you, and I take ‘emon.”

The girl looked at him. “I’m not so hot,” she said soberly. “ I hope you won’t get mad.”

“Why? If we get beat?” They moved together toward the court where the two players were now exchanging sides. “Do you know what the finest sensation of all is?” Her straight brown head moved just at his shoulder. It’s her dress that makes her armsand hands so brown, he thought. Little. He could not remember her at all sixteen months back, when he had gone away. They grow up so quickly, though, after a certain age. Go away again and return, and find her with a baby, probably.

“Good music?” she suggested tentatively, after a time.

“No. It’s to finisha day and say to yourself: Here’s one day during which I have accomplished nothing and hurt no one and had a whale of a good time. How does it go? ‘Count that day lost whose low descending sun—’? Well, they’ve got it exactly backward.”

“I don’t know. I learned it in school, I guess,” sheanswered indifferently. “But I don’t remember itnow. D’you reckon they’ll let me play? I’m not sohot,” she repeated.

“Of course they will,” Horace assured her. And soon they were aligned: the two players, the bookkeeper in the local department store and a youth who had been recently expelled from the state university for a practical joke (he had removed the red lantern from the barrier about a street excavation and hung it above the door of the girls’ dormitory) against Horace and the girl. Horace was an exceptional player, electric and brilliant. One who knew tennis and who had patience and a cool head could have defeated him out of hand by letting him beat himself . But not these. The points see-sawed back and forth, but usually Horace managed to retrieve the advantage with stroking or strategy so audacious as to obscure the faultiness of his tactics.

Meanwhile he could watch her; her taut earnestness, her unflagging determination not to let him down, her awkward virginal grace. From the back line he outguessed their opponents with detached and impersonal skill, keeping the point in abeyance and playing the ball so as to bring her young intentbody into motion as he might pull a puppet’s strings. Hers was an awkward speed that cost them points, but from the base line Horace retrieved her errors when he could, pleasuring in the skimpy ballooning of her little dress moulded and dragged by her arms and legs, watching the taut revelations of her speeding body in a sort of ecstasy. Girl white and all thy little Oh. Notpink, no. For amoment I thought she’d no. Disgraceful, her mamma would call it. Or any other older woman. Belle’s are pink. O muchly “Oaten reed above the lyre,” Horace chanted, catching the ball at his shoe-tops with a full swing, watching it duck viciouslybeyondthe net. Oaten reed above the lyre. And Belle like a harped gesture, not sonorous. Piano, perhaps. Blended chords, any way. Unchaste —? Knowledgeable better. Knowingly wearied. Weariedly knowing. Yes, piano. Fugue. Fugue of discontent. O moon rotting waxed overlong too long.