William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

Through streets identical with those at home they moved smoothly, toward an identical square. People along the streets turned and looked after them curiously. They crossed the square without stopping and into another quiet street. There were no arc lights at the street intersections, since there was a moon, and they went on between broad lawns and shaded windows, and presently beyond an iron fence and set well back among ancient trees, lighted windows hung in ordered tiers like rectangular lanterns strung among the branches.

They stopped here in shadow. The negroes descended and lifted the bass viol out, and a guitar. The third negro held a slender tube frosted over with keys upon which the intermittent moon glinted in hushed glints, and they stood with their heads together, murmuring among themselves and touching plaintive muted chords from the strings. Then the one with the clarinet raised it to his lips.

The tunes were old tunes. Some of them were sophisticated tunes and formally intricate, but in the rendition this was lost and all of them were imbued instead with a plaintive similarity, a slurred and rhythmic simplicity, and they drifted in rich plaintive chords upon the silver air fading, dying in minor reiterations along the treacherous vistas of moon and shadow. They played again, an old waltz. The college Cerberus came across the dappled lawn to the fence, but without antagonistic intent. Across the street, in the shadows there, other listeners stood; a car approached and slowed into the curb and shut off motor and lights, and in the tiered windows heads leaned, aureoled against the lighted rooms behind, without individuality at this distance but feminine and delicately and divinely young.

At last they played “Home, Sweet Home” andwhen the rich minor died away, across to them came a soft clapping of slender palms. Then Mitch sang “Goodnight, Ladies” in his true, oversweet tenor, and the young hands were more importunate; and as they drove away the slender heads leaned aureoled with bright hair in the lighted windows and the soft dapping drifted after them for a long while, fainter and fainter in the silver silence.

At the top of the first hill out of town they stopped and Hub removed the breather cap. Behind them random lights among the trees, and it was as though there came yet to them across the hushed world that sound of young palms like flung delicate flowers before their youth and masculinity, and they drank without speaking, lapped yet in the fading magic of the lost moment Mitch sang tp himself softly; the car slid purring on again. The road dropped curving smoothly, empty and blanched. Bayard broke the spell

“Cut out, Hub,” he said. Hub bent forward and reached under the dash and the car slid on with a steady leashed muttering like waking thunderous wings, then the road flattened in a long swoop toward another rise and the muttering lept to crescendo and the car shot forward with neck-snapping violence. The negroes’ murmur ceased, then one of them raised a wailing shout.

“Reno lost his hat,’’ Hub said, looking back.

“He don’t need it,” Bayard shouted in reply. The car roared up this hill and rushed across the crest of it and flashed around a tight “banked curve.

“Oh, Lawd,” the negro wailed “Mr. Bayard!” His words whipped away behind like stripped leaves. “Lemme out, Mr. Bayard!”

“Jump out, then,” Bayard answered. The road fell from beneath them like a tilting floor and awayacross a valley, straight now as a string. The negroes crouched with their eyes shut against the air blast, clutching their instruments. The speedometer showed 55 and 60 and turned slowly on. Mad rushing miles sped beneath them, sparse houses loomed into the headlights’ sweep, flashed slumbering away, and fields and patches of woodland like tunnels, and still they roared on beneath the silver night across the black and silver land.

The road wound among the hills. Whip-poor-wills called on either side, one to another in quiring liquid astonishment at their thunderous phantom; at intervals when the headlights swept in the road’s abrupt windings two spots of pale fire blinked in the dust before the bird blundered awkwardly somewhere beneath the radiator. The ridge rose steadily, with wooded slopes falling away on either hand. Sparse negro cabins squatted upon the slopes or beside the road, dappled with shadow and lightless and profound with slumber; beneath trees before them wagons stood or warped farm implements leaned, shelterless, after the shiftless fashion of negroes.

The road dipped, then rose again in a long slant broken by another dip; then it stood directly before them like a wall. The car shot upward and over the dip, left the road completely, then swooped dreadfully on, and the negroes’ concerted wail whipped forlornly away. Then the ridge attained its crest and the car’s thunder ceased and it came slowly to a stop. The negroes sat now in the bottom of the tonneau.

“Is dis heaven?” one murmured after a time.

“Dey wouldn’t let you in heaven, wid licker on yo’ breaf and no hat, feller,” another said.

“Ef de Lawd don’t take no better keer of me dan He done of dat hat, I don’t wanter go dar, noways,” the first rejoined.

“Mmmmm,” the second agreed.“When us come down dat ‘ere las’ hill, dis yere cla’inet almos’ blowed clean outen my han’,, let ‘lone my hat.”

“And when us jumped over dat ‘ere lawg er whut-ever it wuz back dar,” the, third one added, “I thought for a minute dis whole auto’bile done blowedoutenmy han’.”

They drank again. It was high here, and the air moved with gray coolness. On either hand lay a valley filled with shadow and with ceaseless whip-poor-wills; beyond these valleys the silver earth rolled on into the sky. Across it, sourceless and mournful and far, a dog howled. Before them the lights on the courthouse clock were steadfast and yellow and unwinking in the dissolving distance, but in all other directions the world rolled away in slumbrous ridges, milkily opaline. Bayard’s head felt as cool and clear as a clapperless and windless bell. Within it that head emerged clearly at last, those two eyesround with grave astonishment, winged serenely by two dark wings of hair. He sat for a while in the motionless car, gazing into the sky.

“It was that Benbow girl,”he said to himself quietly.

All of her instincts were antipathetic toward him, toward his violence and his brutally obtuse disregard of all the qualities which composed her being. His idea was like a trampling of heavy feet in those cool corridors of hers, in that grave serenity in which her days accomplished themselves; at the very syllables of his name her instincts brought her upstanding and under arms against him, thus increasing, doubling the sense of violation by the act of repulsing him and by the necessity for it. And yet, despite her armed sentinels, he still crashed with that hot violence of his through the bastions and thundered at the very inmost citadel of her being. Even chance seemed to abet him, lending to his brutal course a sort of theatrical glamor, a tawdry simulation of the virtues which the reasons (if he had reasons) for his actions outwardly ridiculed. That mad flaming beast he rode almost over her car and then swerved it with an utter disregard of consequences to himself onto a wet sidewalk in order to avoid a frightened child; the pallid, suddenly dreaming calm of his bloody face from which violence had been temporarily wiped as with a damp cloth, leaving it still with that fine bold austerity of Roman statuary, beautiful as a flame shaped in bronze and cooled: the outward form of its energy but without its heat,

Her appetite was gone at sapper, and Aunt Sally mouthed her prepared soft food and mumbled querulously at her because she would not eat But eat she could not; there was still between her and any desire for food the afternoon’s experience like a recurring echo in her violated corridors—the mad rash of the beast and its rider like a bronze tidal wave, into which the small running figure in white and pale blue was sucked and overwhelmed and spewed forth again unscathed while the wave spent its blind fury and ebbed, leaving the rider prone on the wet sidewalk while the horse stood erect like a man and struck at him with its forefeet And partly because that with recurrence of the picture her sense of irremediable violation increased and partly through irritation and anger with herself because it did, food choked her; she could not swallow it.