William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

“I has to toll ‘im wid dat,” Eunice explained. “He’ll eat anything, ef I jes’ makes ‘im a chocolate pie,” she added proudly.

“I bet he does,” Narcissa agreed. “Nobody can make chocolate pies like yours.”

“Dis one ain’t turnt out so well,” Eunice said, deprecatory. “I ain’t so pleased wid it.”

‘Why, Eunice! It’s perfect.”

“No’m, it ain’t up to de mark,” Eunice insisted. But she beamed, gravely diffident, and for a few minutesthe two of them talked amicably while Narcissa pried into cupboards and boxes.

Then she returned to the house and mounted to her room. The dressing table was bare of its intimate silver and crystal, and the drawers were empty, and the entire room with its air of still and fading desolation, reproached her. Chill, too; there had been no fire in the grate since last spring, arid on the table beside the bed, in a blue vase, was a small faded bunch of flowers, forgotten and withered and dead. Touching them, they crumbled in her fingers, leaving a stain, and the water in the vase smelled of rank decay. She opened a window and threw them out.

The room was too chill to stop in long, and she decided to ask Eunice to build a fire on the hearth, for the sake of that part of her which still lingered here, soberly and a little sorrowful in the chill and reproachful desolation. At her chest of drawers she paused again and remembered those letters, fretfully and with a little brooding alarm, deprecating anew her carelessness in not destroying them. But maybe she had, and so entered again into the closed circle of her first fear and bewilderment, tryingto remember what she had done with them. But she was certain she had left them in the drawer with her under-things, positive that she had put them there. Yet she had never been able to find them, nor had Eunice nor Horace seen them. The day she had missed them was the day before her wedding, when she packed her things. That day she had missed them, finding in their stead one in a different handwriting, which shedid not remember having received. The gist of it was plain enough, although she had not understood some of it literally. But on that day, she read it with tranquil detachment: it and all it implied was definitelybehind her now. And lacking even this, she would not have been shocked if she had comprehended it. Curious, a little perhaps, at some, of the words, but that is all,

But what she had done with those other letters she could not remember, and not being able to gave her moments of definite fear when she considered the possibility that people might learn that someone had thought such things about her and put them into words. Well, they were gone; there was nothing to do save hope that she had destroyed them as she had the last one, or if she had not, to trust that they would never be found. Yet that brought back the original distaste and dread: the possibility that the intactness of her deep and heretofore inviolate serenity might be the sport of circumstance; that she must trust to chance against the eventuality of a stranger casually raising a stray bit of paper from the ground...

But she would put this firmly aside, for the time being, at least. This should be Horace’s day, and her -own too; a surcease from that ghost-ridden dream to which she clung, waking. She descended the stairs. There was a fire in the living room. It had burned down to embers, however, and she put coal on it and punched it to a blaze. That would be the first thing he’d see when he entered; perhaps he’d wonder; perhaps he’d know before he entered, having sensed her presence. Then she considered ‘phoning him, and she mused indecisively for a moment before the fire; then decided to let it be a surprise. But supposing he didn’t come home to dinner. She considered this, and pictured him walking along a street in the rain, and immediately and with instinctive foreknowledge of what she would find, she went to the closet beneath the stairs and opened the door. It was as she hadknown: his overcoat and raincoat both hung there; the chances were he didn’t even have an umbrella, and again irritation and exasperation and untroubled affection for him welled in her, and it was as it had been of old again, and all that had since happened to them rolled away.

Heretofore her piano had always been moved into the living room when cold weather came. But this year it stood yet in the smaller alcove. There was a fireplace here, but no fire had been lighted yet, and the room was chilly. Beneath her hands the cold keys gave forth a sluggish chord, accusing, reproving too; and she returned to the fire again and stood before it where she could see through the window the drive beneath its sombre, dripping trees. The small clock on the mantel behind her chimed twelve, and she went to the window and stood with her nose touching the chill glass and her-breath misting it over. Soon, now: he was erratic in his hours, but never tardy, and every time an umbrella came into sight, her heart leaped a little. But it was not he, and she followed the bearer’s plodding passage until he shifted the umbrella enough for her to see who it was and so did not see Horace until he was half way up the drive. His hat was turned down around his face and his coat collar was hunched to his ears, and as she had known, he didn’t even have an umbrella.

“Oh, you idiot,” she said and ran to the door and through the curtained glass she saw his shadowy shape come leaping up the steps. He flung the door open and entered, whipping his sodden hat against his leg, andso did not see her until she stepped forth. “You idiot,” she said. “Where’s your raincoat?”

For a moment he stared at her with his wild and diffident repose, then he said “Narcy!” and his face lighted and he swept her into his wet arms.

“Don’t!” she cried. “You’re wet!” But he swung her from the floor, against his sodden chest, repeating Narcy, Narcy; then his cold nose was against her face and she tasted rain.

“Narcy,” he said again, tagging her, and she ceased trying to free herself and clung to him. Then abruptly he released her and jerked his head up and stared at her with sober intensity.

“Narcy,” he said, still staring at her, “has that surly black-guard...?”

“No, of course not,” she answered sharply. “Haveyou gone crazy?” Then she clung to. him again, wetclothes and all, asthough she would never let him go.“Oh, Horry,” she said, “I’ve been a beast to you!”

“I was hoping” he said—they had eaten the chocolate pie and Horace now stood before the living-room fire, his coffee cup on the mantel, striking matches to his pipe, “that you might have come home for good! That they had sent you back.”

“No,” she answered. “I wish…”

“What?”

But she only said: “You’ll be having somebody, soon.” And then: “When is it to be, Horry?”

He sucked intently at his pipe; in his eyes little twin matchflames rose and fell. “I don’t know. Next spring, I suppose. Whenever she will.”

“You don’t want to,” she stated quietly. “Not after what it’s all got to be now.”

“She’s in Reno now,” he added, puffing at his pipe, his face averted a little. “Little Belle wrote me a letter about mountains.”

She said: “Poor Harry.” She sat with her chin in her palms, gazing into the fire.

“He’ll have little Belle,” he reminded her. “He cares more forher than be does for Belle, anyway.”

“You don’t know,” she told him soberly. “You just say that because you want to believe it”

“Don’t you think he’s well off, rid of a-woman who doesn’t want him, who doesn’t even love his child very much?”

“You don’t know,” she repeated. “People can’t—can’t—You can’t play fast and loose with the way things ought to go on, after they’ve started off.”