William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

Aunt Sally had returned home, with her bag of colored scraps and her false teeth, leaving behind her a fixed impalpability of a nebulous but definite obligation conferred at some personal sacrifice, as was her way, and a faint odor of old female flesh which faded from the rooms slowly, lingering yet in unexpected places, so that at times Narcissa, waking and lying for a while in the darkness, in the sensuous pleasure of having Horace home again, imagined that. she could hear yet in the dark myriad silence of the house Aunt Sally’s genteel and placid snores.

At times it would be so distinct that she would pause suddenly and speak Aunt Sally’s name into an empty room. And sometimes Aunt Sally replied, having availed herself again of her prerogative of coming in at any hour the notion took her, unannounced, to see how they were getting along and tocomplain querulously of her own household She was old, too old to react easily to change, and it was hard for her to readjust herself to her sisters’ ways again after her long sojourn in a household where everyone gave in to her regarding all domestic affairs. At home her older sister ran things in a capable shrewish fashion; she and the third aster persisted in treating Aunt Sally like the child she had been sixty-five years ago, whose diet and clothing and hours must be rigorously and pettishly supervised.

“I can’t even go to the bathroom in peace,” she complained querulously. “Pm a good mind to pack up and move back over here, and let ‘em get along the best way they can.” She rocked fretfully in the chair which by unspoken agreement was never disputed her, looking about the room with her bleared old eyes. “That nigger don’t half clean up since I left. That furniture, now...adampcloth...”

“I wish you would take her back,” Miss Sophia, the elder aster, told Narcissa. “She’s got so crochety since she’s been with you that there’s no living with her. What’s this I hear Horace’s taken up? Making glassware?”

His proper crucibles and retorts had arrived intact. At first he had insisted on using the cellar, clearing out the lawn mower and the garden tools and all the accumulate impedimenta, and walling up the windows so as to make a dungeon of it. But Narcissa had finally persuaded him upon the upper floor of the garage and here he had set up his furnace and had had four mishaps and produced one almost perfect vase of clear amber, larger, more richly and chastely serene and which he kept always on his night table and called by his sister’s name in the intervals of apostrophizing both of them impartially in his moments of rhapsody over the realization of the meaning ofpeace and the unblemished attainment of it, as Thou still unravished bride of quietude.

At times he found himself suddenly quiet, a little humble in the presence of the happiness of his winged and solitary cage. For a cage it was, barring him from freedom with trivial compulsions; but he desired a cage. A topless cage, of course, that his spirit might wing on short excursions into the blue, but far afield his spirit did not desire to go: its direction was always upward plummeting, for a plummeting fall.

Still unchanging days. They were doomed days; he knew it, yet for the time being his devious and uncontrollable impulses had become one with the rhythm of things as a swimmer’s counter muscles become one with a current, and cage and all his life grew suave with motion, oblivious of destination. During this period not only did his immediate days become starkly inevitable, but the dead thwarted ones with all the spent and ludicrous disasters which his nature had incurred upon him, grew lustrous in retrospect and without regret, and those to come seemed as undeviating and logical as mathematical formulae beyond an incurious golden veil.

At Sewanee, where he had gone as his father before him, he had been an honor man in his class. As a Rhodes Scholar he had gone to Oxford, there to pursue the verities and humanities with that waiting law office in a Mississippi country town like a gate in the remote background through which he must someday pass, thinking of it not often and with no immediate perspective, accepting it with neither pleasure nor regret Here, amid the mellow benignance of these walls, was a perfect life, a life accomplishing itself placidly in a region remote from time and into which the world’s noises came onlyfrom afar and with only that glamorous remote significance of a parade passing along a street far away; with inferences of brass and tinselfading beyond far walls, into the changeless sky. Here he developed a reasonably fine discrimination in alcohol and a brilliant tennis game, after his erratic electric fashion; but save for an occasional half sophomoric, half travelling-sales-manish sabbatical to the Continent in company with fellow-countrymen, his life was a golden and purposeless dream, without palpable intent or future with the exception of that law office to which he was reconciled by the sheer and youthful insuperability of distance and time.

There had come a day on which he stood in that mild pleasurable perplexity in which we regard our belongings and the seemingly inadequate volume of possible packing space, coatless among his chaotic possessions, slowly rubbing the fine unruly devastation of his head About the bedroom bags and boxes gaped, and on the bed, on chairs, on the floor, were spread his clothes—jackets and trousers of all kinds .and all individual as old friends. A servant moved about in the next room and he entered, but the man ignored him with silent and deft efficiency, and he went on to the window. The thin curtains starred to a faint troubling exhalation of late spring. He put their gentle billowing aside and lit a cigarette and idly watched the match fall, its initial outward impulse fading into a wavering reluctance, as though space itself were languid in violation. Someone crossing the quad called up to him indistinguishably. He waved his hand vaguely in reply and sat on the window sill.

Outward, above and beyond buildings peaceful and gray and old, within and beyond trees in an untarnished and gracious resurgence of green, afternoon was like a blonde woman going slowly in awindless garden; afternoon and June were likeblonde sisters in a windless garden—close, approachingwithout regret the fall of day. Walking a littleslower, perhaps; perhaps looking backward, butwithout sadness, untroubled as cows. Horace sat inthe window while the servant methodically reducedthe chaps of his possessions to the boxes and bags,gazing out across ancient gray roofs, and trees whichhe had seen in all their seasonal moods, in all moodsmatching his own. Had he been younger he wouldhave said goodbye to them secretively or defiantly;older, he would have felt neither the desire to northe impulse to suppress it. So he sat quietly in hiswindow for the last time while the curtains stirreddelicately against his hair, brooding upon theirdreaming vistas where twilight was slowly finding itself and where, beyond dissolving spires, lingeredgrave evening shapes; and he knew a place where,had he felt like walking, he could hear a cuckoo, thatsymbol of sweet and timeless mischief, that augur of

the fever renewed again.

All he wanted anyway was quiet and dull peace arid a few women, preferably-young and good looking and fair tennis players, with whom to indulge in harmless and lazy intrigue. So his mind was made up, and on the homeward boat he framed the words with which he should tell his father that he was going to be an Episcopal minister. But when he reached New York the wire waited him saying that Will Benbow was ill, and all thoughts of his future fled his mind during the journey home and during the two subsequent days that his father lived. Then Will Benbow was buried beside his wife, and Aunt Sally Wyatt was sombrely ubiquitous about the house and talked with steady macabre complacence of Will at mealsand snored placidly by night inthe guest room. Thenext day but one Horace opened his father’s lawoffice again.