William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

“It have more time for reading, now,” she answered.

“Yes.”His hand stillmoved about the table, touching things here and there. She lay waiting for him to speak. But he did not, and she said:

“What is it, Horry?”

Then he ceased, and he came and sat on the edge of the bed. But still her eyes were gravely interrogatory and the shadow of her mouth was stubbornly cold. “Narcy?” he said. She lowered her eyesto the book, and he added: “First, I want to apologize for leaving you alone so often at night.”

“Yes?”

He laid his hand on her knee. “Look at me.” She raised her face, and the antagonism of her eyes.“I want to apologize for leaving you alone at night,” he repeated.

“Does that mean you aren’t going to do it anymore, or that you’re not coming in at all?”

For a time he sat, brooding upon the wild repose of his hand upon her covered knee. Then he rose and stood beside the table again, touching the objects there, then he returned and sat on the bed. She was reading again, and he tried to take the book from her hand. She resisted.

“What do you want, Horace?” she asked impatiently.

He mused again while she watched him. Then he looked up. “Belle and I are going to be married,” he blurted.

“Why tell me? Harry is the one to tell. Unless you all are going to dispense with the formality of divorce.”

“Yes,” he said. “He knows it.” He laid his hand on her knee again, stroking it through the covers. “You aren’t even surprised, are you?”

“I’m surprised at you, but not at Belle. Belle has a backstairs nature.”

“Yes,” he agreed; then: “Who said that to you? You didn’t think of that.” She lay with her book half raised, watching him. He took her hand roughly; she tried to free it; but he held on. “Who was it?” he demanded.

“Nobody told me. Don’t Horace.”

He released her hand. “I know who it was. It was Mrs. DuPre.”

“It wasn’t anybody,” she repeated. “Go away and leave me alone, Horace.” And behind the antagonismher eyes were hopeless and desperate. “Don’t you see that talking doesn’t help any?”

“Yes,” he said wearily, but he sat for a while yet, stroking her knee. Then he rose, but turning, he paused again. “Here’s a letter for you. I forgot it this afternoon. Sorry.”

But she was reading again. “Put it on the table,” she said, without raising her eyes. He laid it on the table and went out. At the door he looked back, but her head was bent over her book.

As he removed his clothes it did seem that that heavy fading odor of Belle’s body clung to them, and to his hands even after he was in bed; and clinging, shaped in the darkness beside him Belle’s rich voluption, until within that warm, not-yet-sleeping region where dwells the mother of dreams, Belle grew palpable in ratio as his own body slipped away from him. And Harry top, with his dogged inarticulateness and his hurt groping which was partly damaged vanity and shock, yet mostly a boy’s sincere bewilderment; that freed itself terrifically in the form of movie subtitles. Just before he slept his mind, with the mind’s uncanny attribute of irrelevant recapitulation, reproduced with the startling ghostliness of a Dictaphone, an incident which at the time he had considered trivial Belle had freed her mouth, and for a moment, with her body still against his, she held his face in her two hands and stared at him with intent questioning eyes . “Have you plenty of money, Horace?” And “Yes,” he had answered immediately. “Of course I have.” And then Belle again, enveloping him like a rich and fatal drug, like a motionless and cloying sea in which he watched himself drown.

The letter lay on the table that night, forgotten; it was not until the next morning that she discovered it and opened it.

“I am trying to forget you. I cannot forget you. Your big eyes, your black hair, how white your black hair will make you look. And how you walk I am watching you and a smell you give off like a flower. Your eyes shine with mystery and how you walk makes me sick like a fever all night thinking how you walk. I could touch you, you would not know it. Every day. But I can not I must pore out on paper must talk. You do not know who. Your lips like cupids bow when the day comes when I will press them to mine like I dreamed like a fever from heaven to hell. I know what you do I know more than you think I see men visiting you with bitter twangs. Be careful I am a desperate man. Nothing is any more to me now. If you unholy love a man I will killhim.

“You do not answer. I know you got it. I saw one in your hand. You better answer soon I am a desperate man eat up with fever. I can not sleep for. I will not hurt you but I amdesperate. Do not forget I will not hurt you but I am a desperate man.”

Meanwhile the days accumulated. Not sad days nor lonely: they were too feverish to be sorrowful, what with the violated serenity of her nature torn in two directions, and the walls of her garden cast down, and she herself like a night animal or bird caught in a beam of light and trying vainly to escape. Horace had definitely gone his way; they could no longer hear one another’s feet on the dark road; and, like two strangers they followed the routine of theirdays, in an unbending estrangement of long affection and similar pride beneath a shallow veneer of polite trivialities. She sat with Bayard almost every day now, but at a discreet distance of two yards. At first he tried to override her with bluster, then with cajolery. But she was firm and at last he desisted and lay gazing quietly out the window or sleeping while she read. From time to time Miss Jenny would come to the door and look in at them and go away. Her shrinking, her sense of dread and unease while with him, was gone now, and at times instead of reading they talked, quietly and impersonally, with that ghost of that other afternoon between them, though neither referred to it. Miss Jenny had been a little curious about that day, but Narcissa was gravely and demurely noncommittal about it; nor had Bayard ever talked about it, and so there was another bond between them, but unirksome. Miss Jenny had heard gossip about Horace and Belle, but on this subject also Narcissa would not talk.

“Have it your own way,? Miss Jenny said tardy; “I can draw my own conclusions. I imagine Belle and Horace can produce quite a mess together. And I’m glad of it. That man is making an old maid out of you. It isn’t too late now, but if he’d waited five years later to play the fool, there wouldn’t be anything left for you except to give music lessons. But you can get married, now.”

“Would you advise me to marry?” Narcissa asked.

“I wouldn’t advise anybody to marry. You won’t be happy, but women haven’t got civilized enough yet to be happy unmarried, so you might as well try it. We can stand anything, anyway. And change is good for folks. They say it is, that is.”

But Narcissa didn’t believe that I shall never marry, she told herself. Men....that was where unhappiness lay. And if I couldn’t keep Horace, loving him as I did...Bayard slept. She picked up the book and read on to herself, about antic people in an antic world where things happened as they should. The shadows lengthened eastward. She read on, lost from mutable things.

After a while Bayard waked, and she fetched him a cigarette and a match. “You won’t have to do this anymore,” he said.; “I reckon you’re glad.”

His cast would come off tomorrow, he meant, and he lay smoking his cigarette and talking of what he would do when he was about again. He would see about getting his car repaired first thing; have to take it to Memphis, probably. And he planned a trip for the three of them—Narcissa, Miss Jenny and himself—while the car was in the shop. “It’ll take about a week,” he added. “She must be in pretty bad shape. Hope I haven’t hurt her guts any.”