Flags in the Dust Read Online Free PDF Page A

and flowering shrubs. But the house had burned and some of the trees had been felled to make room for an architectural garbling so imposingly terrific as to possess a kind of majesty. It was a monument to the frugality (and the mausoleum of the social aspirations of his women) of a hillman who had moved in from a small settlement called Frenchman’s Bend and who, as Miss Jenny Du Pre put it, had built the handsomest house in Frenchman’s Bend on the most beautiful lot in Jefferson. The hillman had stuck it out for two years during which his women-folks sat about the veranda all morning in lace-trimmed “boudoir caps” and spent the afternoons in colored silk riding about town in a rubber-tired surrey; then the hillman sold his house to a new-comer to the town and took his women back to the country and doubtless set them to work again.
    A number of motor-cars ranked along the street lent a formally festive air to the place, and Simon with his tilted cigarstub wheeled up and drew rein and indulged in a brief colorful altercation with a negro sitting behind the wheel of a car parked before the hitching-block. “Dont block off no Sartoris ca’iage, black boy,” Simon concluded, when the other had moved the motor and permitted him access to the post. “Block off de commonality, ef you wants, but dont intervoke no equipage waitin’ on Cunnel er Miss Jenny. Dey wont stan’ fer it.”
    He descended and tethered the horses, and his spirit mollified by the rebuke administered and laved with the beatitude of having gained his own way, Simon paused and examined the motor-car with curiosity and no little superciliousness tinged faintly with respectful envy, and spoke affably with its conductor. But not for long, for Simon had sisters in the Lord in this kitchen, and presently he let himself into the yard and followed the gravel driveway around to the back. He could hear the party going on as he passed beneath the windows: that sustained unintelligible gabbling with which white ladies could surround themselves without effort and which they seemed to consider a necessary (or unavoidable) adjunct to having a good time. The fact that it was a card party would have seemed neither paradoxical nor astonishing to Simon, for time and much absorbing experience had taught him a fine tolerance of white folks’ vagaries and for those of ladies of any color.
    The hillman had built his house so close to the street that the greater part of the original lawn with its fine old trees lay behind it. There were once crepe-myrtle and syringa and lilac and jasmine bushes without order, and massed honeysuckle on fences and tree trunks; and after the first house had burned these had taken the place and made of its shaggy formality a mazed and scented jungle loved of mockingbirds and thrushes, where boys and girls lingered on spring and summer nights among drifting fireflies and quiring whip-poor-wills and usuallythe liquid tremolo of a screech owl. Then the hillman had bought it and cut some of the trees in order to build his house near the street after the country fashion, and chopped out the jungle and whitewashed the remaining trees and ran his barn- and hog- and chicken-lot fences between their ghostly trunks. He didn’t remain long enough to learn of garages.
    Some of the antiseptic desolation of his tenancy had faded now, and its present owner had set out more shrubbery—jasmine and mock-orange and verbena—with green iron tables and chairs beneath them and a pool and a tennis court; and Simon passed on with discreet assurance, and on a consonantless drone of female voices he rode into the kitchen where a thin woman in a funereal purple turban and poising a beaten biscuit heaped with mayonnaise, and a mountainous one in the stained apron of her calling and drinking melted ice-cream from a saucer, rolled their eyes at him.
    “I seed him on de street yistiddy and he looked bad; he jes’ didn’t favor hisself,” the visitor was saying as Simon