William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

Just as it should be, and Horace turned and looked back at his aster crossing the drive with the parcels he had forgotten again. The meaning of peace.

He banged and splashed happily in his bathroom, shouting through the door to his sister where she sat on his bed. His discarded khaki lay upon a chair, holding yet through long association, in its harsh drab folds, something of life taut and delicate futility. On the old marble-topped dresser lay the crucible and tubes of his glass-blowing outfit, the first one he had bought, and beside it the vase he had blown on shipboard—a small chaste shape in clear glass not four inches high, fragile as a silver lily and incomplete.

“They work in caves,” he was shouting through the door, “down flights of stairs underground. You feel water seeping under your foot while you arereaching for the next step, and when you put your hand out to steady yourself against the wall, it’s wet when you take it away. It feels just like blood”

“Horace!”

“Yes, magnificent And way ahead you see the glow. All of a sudden the tunnel comes glimmering out of nothing, then you see the furnace, with things rising and falling in front of it, cutting the light off, and the walls go glimmering again. At first they’re just shapeless things hunching about. Antic, with shadows on the wet walls, red shadows; a dull red gleam, and black shapes like cardboard cut-outs rising and falling like a magic-lantern shutter. And then a face comes out, blowing, and the other faces sort of swell out of the red dark like painted balloons.

“And the things themselves! Sheerly and tragically beautiful. Like preserved flowers, you know. Macabre and inviolate; purged and purified as bronze, yet fragile as soap bubbles. Sound of pipes crystallized. Flutes and oboes, but mostly reeds. Oaten reeds. Dammit, they bloom like flowers right before your eyes. Midsummer night’s dream to a salamander.” His voice became unintelligible, soaring into phrases which she did not herself recognize, but from the pitch of his voice she knew were Milton’s archangels in their sonorous plunging ruin.

Presently he emerged, in a white shirt and serge trousers but still borne aloft on his flaming verbal wings, and while his voice chanted in measured syllables she fetched a pair of shoes from the closet, and while she stood holding the shoes, he ceased and touched her face again with his hands after that fashion of a child.

At supper Aunt Sally broke into his staccato babbling.

“Did you bring your Snopes back with yon?” she asked. This Snopes was a young man, member of a seemingly inexhaustible family which for the last ten or twelve years had been moving to town in driblets from a small settlement known as Frenchman’s Bend. Flem, the first Snopes, had appeared unheralded one day and without making a ripple in the town’s life, behind the counter of a small restaurant on a side street, patronized by country people. With this foothold and like Abraham of old, he led his family piece by piece into town. Flem himself was presently manager of the city light and water plant, and for the following few years he was a sort of handy-man to the city government; and three years ago, to old Bayard Sartoris’ profane surprise and unconcealed disapproval, he became vice-president of the Sartoris bank, where already a relation of his was a bookkeeper.

He still retained the restaurant, and the canvas tent in the rear of it in which he and his wife and baby had passed the first few months of their residence in town, and It served as an alighting-place for incoming Snopeses, from which they spread to small third-rate businesses of various kinds—grocery stores, barber shops (there was one, an invalid of some sort, with a second-hand peanut parcher)— where they multiplied and flourished. The older residents, from their Jeffersonian houses and genteel stores and offices, looked on with amusement at first But this was long since become something like consternation.

The Snopes to which Aunt Sally referred was named Montgomery Ward and he had just turned twenty-one in ‘17, and just before the draft law went into effect he applied to a recruiting officer in Memphis and was turned down because of his heart. Later, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, particularly that of Horace Benbow’s friends, he departed with Horace to a position in the YJV1GA. Later still it was told of him that he had travelled all the way to Memphis on that day he offered himself for service, with a plug of chewing tobacco beneath his left armpit But he and his patron had already gone when that story got out

“Did you bring your Snopes back with you?” Aunt Sally asked.

“No,” he answered, and his thin, nerve-sick face clouded with a fine cold distaste. “I was very much disappointed in him. I don’t even care to talk about

“Anybody could have told you that when you left,” Aunt Sally said, chewing slowly above her plate. Horace brooded for a moment, his thin hand tightened slowly about his fork.

“Ifs individuals like that, parasites—” he began, but his sister interrupted,

“Who cares about an old Snopes, anyway?” she said. “Besides, it’s too late at night to talk about the horrors of war.” Aunt Sally made a moist sound through her food, of vindicated superiority.

“It’s the generals they have nowadays,” she said. “General Johnston or General Forrest wouldn’t have took a Snopes in his army.” Aunt Sally was no relation at all She lived next door but one with two maiden sisters, one younger and one older than she. She had been in and out of the house ever since Horace and Narcissa could remember, having arrogated to herself certain rights in their lives before they could walk; rights which were never expressed and which she never availed herself of, yet the mutual understanding of which she never permitted to fallinto desuetude. She would walk into any of the rooms unannounced, and she liked to talk tediously and a little tactlessly of Horace’s and Narcissa’s infantile ailments. It was said that she had once ‘made eyes’ at Will Benbow although she was a woman of thirty-four or -five when Will married; and she still spoke of him with a faintly disparaging possessive-ness, and of his wife she spoke nicely, too. “ Juliawas a right sweet-natured girl,” Aunt Sally would say.

So when Horace went off to the war Aunt Sally moved over to keep Narcissa company: no other arrangement had ever occurred to any one of the three of them. Aunt Sally was a good old soul, but she lived much in the past, shutting her intelligence with a bland finality to anything which had occurred since 1’01. For her, time had gone out drawn by horses, and into her stubborn and placid vacuum the squealing of automobile brakes had never penetrated. Aunt Sally had a lot of the crudities which old people are entitled to. She liked the sound of her own voice and she didn’t like to be alone in the house after dark, and as she had never got accustomed to her false teeth and so never touched them other than to change occasionally the water in which they sat, she ate unprettily of unprepossessing but easily malleable foods. Narcissa reached her hand beneath the table and squeezed her brother’s knee.

“I am glad you’re home, Horry.”

He looked at her quickly, and the cloud faded from his face as suddenly as it had come, and he let himself slip, as into water, into the constant serenity of her affection again.

He was a lawyer, principally through a sense of duty to the family tradition, and though he had no particular affinity to it other than a love for printed words, for the dwelling-places of books, he contemplated returning to his musty office with a glow of...not eagerness: no; of deep and abiding unreluctance, almost of pleasure. The meaning of peace. Old unchanging days; unwinged, perhaps, but undisastrous, too. You don’t see it, feel it, save with perspective. Fireflies had not yet come, and the cedars flowed unbroken on either hand down to the street, like a curving ebony wave with rigid un-breaking crests pointed on the sky. Light fell outward from the casement, across the porch and upon a bed of cannas, hardy, bronze-like—none of your flower-like fragility, theirs; and within the room Aunt Sally’s quavering monotone, Narcissa was there too, beside the lamp with a book, filling the room with her still and constant presence like the odor of jasmine, watching the door; and Horace stood on the dark veranda with his cold pipe, surrounded by that cool, faintly-stringent scent of cedar trees like another presence. The meaning of peace, he said to himself again, releasing the grave words one by one within the cool bell of silence into which he bad come at last again, hearing them linger with a dying fall pure as silver and crystal struck lightly together.