William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

So the morning wore away. He ordered more Coca-Colas and consumed his and returned to his desk Toward mid-morning the first fury that had raged in him had worn itself away, The images still postured in his mind, but they were now so familiar as to be without personal significance. Or rather, his dulled senses no longer responded so quickly; and one part of him labored steadily on with steady neat care while the other jaded part reviewed the coiling shapes with a sort of dull astonishment that they no longer filled his blood with fire-maenads. It was a sort of stupor, and he wrote on and on, and it was some time before his dulled nerves reacted to a fresh threatand caused him to raise his head Virgil Beard was just entering the door.

He slid hurriedly from his stool and slipped around a cabinet and darted through the door of old Bayard’s office. He crouched within the door, heard the boy ask politely for him, heard the cashier say that he was there a minute ago but that he reckoned he had stepped out; heard the boy say well, he reckoned he’d wait for him. And he crouched within the door, wiping his drooling mouth with his handkerchief.

After a while he opened the door cautiously and peered out The boy squatted patiently and blandly on his heels against the wall, and Snopes stood again with his clenched trembling hands. He did not curse: his desperate fury was beyond words; but his breath came and went with a fast ah-ah-ah sound in his throat and it seemed to him that his eyeballs were being drawn back and back into his skull, turning further and further until the cords that drew them reached the snapping. point. Then he opened the door and went out.

“Hi, Mr. Snopes,” the boy said genially, rising; but Snopes strode on and into the cage and approached the cashier.

“Res,” he said, in a voice scarcely articulate, “gimme five dollars.”

“What?” the cashier said.

“Gimme five dollars,” he repeated hoarsely.The cashier did so, scribbled a notation and speared it on the file at his elbow. The boy had come up to the second window, but Snopes passed on without looking at him, and he followed the man to the rear and into the office again, his bare feet hissing on the linoleum floor.

“I tried to find you last night,” he explained, “butyou warn’t at home.” Then he looked up and saw Snopes’ face, and after a moment he screamed and broke his trance and turned to flee. But Snopes caught him, and he writhed and twisted, screaming steadily with utter terror as the man dragged him across the office and opened the door that gave onto the vacant lot. Snopes was trying to say something in his mad, shaking voice, but the boy screamed steadily. He had lost all control of his body and he hung limp in the man’s hand while Snopes thrust the bill into his pocket. Then he released the boy, who staggered away, found his legs, and fled.

“What were you whuppin’ that boy, for?” the cashier asked curiously, when he returned to the desk.

“For not mindin’ his own business,” Snopes snapped, opening his ledger again.

During the hour the cashier was out to lunch the Snopes was his outward usual self—uncommunicative but efficient, a little covertly sullen, with his mean, close-set eyes and his stubby features; patrons remarked nothing unusual in his bearing. Nor did the cashier when he returned, sucking a toothpick and belching at intervals. But instead of going home to dinner, Snopes repaired to a street occupied by negro stores and barber shops and inquired from door to door. After a half-hour search he found the negro he sought, held a few minutes’conversation with him, then returned across town to his cousin’s restaurant and had a platter of hamburger steak and a cup of coffee.Attwoo’clock hewasbackathisdesk.

The afternoon passed. Three o’clock came; he went around and touched old Bayard’s shoulder and he rose and dragged his chair inside and the Snopes closed the doors and drew the green shades upon the windows. Then he totaled his ledgers while thecashier, counted the cash. In the meantime Simon drove up to the door and presently old Bayard stalked forth and got in the carriage and was driven off. Snopes and the cashier compared notes and struck a balance, and while the other stacked the money away in receptacles he carried his ledgers one by one into the vault. The cashier followed with the cash and put it away and they emerged and the cashier was about to close the vault, when Snopes stopped him. “Forgot the cash-book,” he explained. The cashier returned to his window and Snopes carried the book into the vault and put it away and emerged and clashed the door to, and hiding the dial with his body, herattled the knob briskly. The cashier had his back turned, rolling a cigarette.

“See it’s throwed good,” he said. Snopes rattled the knob again, then shook the door.

“That’s got it.” They took their hats and emerged from the cage and locked it behind them, and passed through the front door, which the cashier closed and shook also. He struck a match to his cigarette.

“See you tomorrow,” he said.

“All right,” Snopes agreed, and he stood looking after the other’s shapeless back in its shabby alpaca coat. He produced his soiled handkerchief and wiped his mouth again.

That evening about eight o’clock he was back down town. He stood for a time with the group that sat nightly in front of the drug store on the corner; stood quietly among them, listening but saying nothing, as was his way. Then he moved on, without being missed, and walked slowly up the street and stopped at the bank door. One or two passers spoke to him while he was finding his key and opening thedoor; he responded in his flat country idiom and entered and dosed the door behind him. A angle bulb burned above the vault He raised the shade on the window beside it and entered the grilled cage and turned on the light above his desk. Here passers could see him, could have watched him for several minutes as he bent over his desk, writing slowly. It was his final letter, in which he poured out his lust and his hatred and his jealousy, and the language was the obscenity which his jealousy and desire had hoarded away in his temporarily half-crazed mind and which the past night and day had liberated. When it was finished he blotted it carefully and folded it and put it in his pocket, and snapped his light off. He entered the directors’ room and in the darkness he unlocked the door which gave onto the vacant lot, closed it and left it unlocked.

He returned to the frontand drew the shade on the window, and drew the other shades to their full extent, until no crack of light showed at their edges, emerged andlockedthe door behind him. On the street he looked casually back at the windows. The shades were close; the interior of the bank was invisible from the street.

The group still talked in front of the drug store and he stopped again on the outskirts of it. People passed back and forth along the street and in or. out of the drug store; one or two of the group drifted away, and newcomers took their places. An automobile drew up to the curb, was served by a negro lad; drove away. The clock on the courthouse struck nine measured strokes.

Soon, with a noise of starting engines, motor cars began to stream out of a side street and onto the square, and presently a flux of pedestrians appeared. It was the exodus from the picture show, and carsone after another drew up to the curb with young men and girls in them, and other youths and girls inpairs turned into the drug store with talk and shrill laughter and cries one to another, with slender bodies in delicate colored dresses, shrill as apes and awkward, divinely young. Then the more sedate groups—a man with a child or so gazing longingly into the scented and gleaming interior of the store, followed by three or; four women—his wife and a neighbor or so—talking sedately among themselves; more children—little girls in prim and sibilant clots, and boys scuffling and darting with changing adolescentshouts. A few of the sitters rose and joined passing groups.