William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

The third time he saw her he was passing a store, a newly opened department store, just as she emerged at that free, purposeful gait he had come to know. In the center of the door all was a small iron ridge ontowhich the double doors locked, and she caught the heel of her slipper on this ridge and emerged stumbling in. a cascade of small parcels, and swearing. It was a man’s bold swearing, and she caught her balance and stamped her foot and kicked one of her dropped parcels savagely into the gutter. Horace retrieved it and turning saw her stooping for the others, and together they gathered them up and rose, and she glanced at him briefly with level eyes of a thick, dark brown and shot with golden lights somehow paradoxically cold.

“Thanks,” she said, without emphasis, taking the packages from him. “They ought to be jailed for having a mantrap like that in the door.” Then she looked at him again, a level stare without boldness or rudeness. “You’re Horace Benbow, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Yes, that is my name. But I don’t believe—”

She was counting her packages. “One more yet,” she said, glancing about her feet. “Must be in the street.” He followed her to the curb, where she had already picked up the other parcel, and she regarded its muddy side and swore again. “Now I’ll have to have it rewrapped.”

“Yes, too bad, isn’t it?” he agreed. “If you’ll allow me—”

“I’ll have it done at the drug store. Come along, if you’re not too busy. I want to talk to you.”

She seemed to take it for granted that he would follow, and he did so, with curiosity and that feeling stronger than ever of a timorous person before a window of sharp knives. When he drew abreast of her she looked at him again (she was almost as tall as he) from beneath her level brows. Her face was rather thin, with broad nostrils. Her mouth was flat though full, and there was in the ugly distinction of her facein indescribable something; a something boding and leashed, yet untamed. Carnivorous, he thought. A lady tiger in a tea gown; and remarking something of his thoughts in his face, she said: “I forgot: of course you don’t know who I am; I’m Belle’s sister.”

“Oh, of course. You’re Joan. I should have known.”

“How? Nobody yet ever said we look alike. And you never saw me before.”

“No,” he agreed, “but I’vebeen expecting for the last three months that some of Belle’s kinfolks would be coming here to see what sort of animal I am.”

“They wouldn’t have sent me, though,” she replied. “You can be easy on that.” They went onlong the street. Horace responded to greetings, buthe strode on with that feline poise of hers; he was aware that men turned to look after her, but in her air there was neither awareness nor disregard of it, conscious or otherwise. And again he remembered that tiger yawning with bored and lazy contempt while round and static eyes stared down its cavernous pink gullet. “I want to stop here “ she said, as they reached the drug store. “Do you have to go back to the store, or whatever it is?”

“Office,” he corrected. “Not right away.”

“That’s right,” she agreed, and he swung the doorpen for her, “you’re a dentist, aren’t you? Belle told me.”.

“Then I’m afraid she’s deceiving us both,” he angered drily. She glanced at him with her level, speculative gaze, and he added:. “She’s got the names confused arid sent you to the wrong man.”

“You seem to be clever,” she said over her shoulder, “and I despise clever men. Don’t you know any better than to waste cleverness on women? Save it for your friends.” A youthful clerk in a white jacketapproached, staring at her boldly; she asked him with contemptuous politeness to rewrap her parcel. Horace stopped beside her.

“Women friends?” he asked.

“Women what?” She stooped down, peering into a showcase of cosmetics; “Well, maybe so,” she said indifferently. “But I never believe ‘em, though. Cheap sports.” She straightened up. “Belle’s all right, ifthat’s what you want to ask. It’s done her good. She doesn’t look so bad-humored and settled down, now. Sort of fat and sullen.”

“I’m glad you think that. But what I am wondering is, how you happened to come here. Harry’s living at the hotel, isn’t he?”

“He’s opened the house again, now. He just wanted somebody to talk to. I came to see what you look like,” she told him.

“What I look like?”

“Yes. To see the man that could make old Belle kick over the traces.” Her eyeswere coldly contemplative, a little curious. “What did you do to her? I’ll bet you haven’t even got any money to speak of.”

Horace grinned a little. “I must seem rather thoroughly impossible to you, then,” he suggested.

“Oh, there’s no accounting for the men women pick out. I sometimes wonder at myself. Only I’ve never chosen one I had to nurse, yet” The clerk returned with her package, and she made a trifling purchase and gathered up her effects.“I suppose you have to stick around your office all day, don’t you?”

“Yes. It’s the toothache season now, you know.”

“You sound like a college boy, now,” she said coldly. “I suppose Belle’s ghost will let you out at night, though?”

“It goes along too,” he answered.

“Well. I’m not afraid of ghosts; I carry a few around, myself.”

“You mean dripping flesh and bloody bones, don’t you?” She looked at him again, with her flecked eyes that should have been warm but were not

“I imagine you could be quite a nuisance,” she told him. He opened the door and she passed through it. And gave him a brief nod, and while he stood on the street with his hat lifted she strode on, without even a conventional Thank you or Goodbye.

That evening while he sat at his lonely supper, shetelephoned him, and thirty minutes later she came in Harry’s car for him. Andforthe next three hours she drove him about while he sat hunched into his overcoat against the raw air. She wore no coat herself and appeared impervious to the chill, and she carried him on short excursions into the muddy winter countryside, the car sliding and skidding while he sat with tensed anticipatory muscles. But mostly they drove monotonously around town while he felt more and more like a faded and succulent eating-creature in a suave parading cage. Sometimes she talked, but usually she drove in a lazy preoccupation, seemingly utterly oblivious of him.

Later, when she had begun coming to his house, coming without secrecy and with an unhurried contempt for possible eyes and ears and tongues—a contempt that also disregarded Horace’s acute unease on that score, she still fell frequently into those periods of aloof and purring “repose. Then, sitting before the fire in his living room, with the bronze and electric disorder of her hair and the firelight glowing in little red points in her unwinking eyes, she was like a sheathed poniard, like Chablis in a tall-stemmed glass. At these times she would utterly ignore him,cold and inaccessible. Then she would rouse and talk brutally of her lovers. Never of herself, other than to give him the salient points in her history that Belle had hinted at with a sort of belligerent prudery. The surface history was brief and simple enough. Married at eighteen to a man three times her age, she had deserted him in Honolulu and fled to Australia with an Englishman, assuming his name; was divorced by her husband, discovered by first-hand experience that no Englishman out of his .native island has any honor about women; was deserted by him in Bombay, and in Calcutta, she married again. An American, a young man, an employee of Standard Oil company. A year later she divorced him, and since then her career had been devious and alittleobscure, due to her restlessness. Her family would know next to nothing of her whereabouts, receiving her brief, infrequent letters from random points half the world apart. Her first husband had made a settlement on her, and from time to time and without warning she returned home and spent a day or a week or a month in the company of her father’s bitter reserve and her mother’s ready tearful uncomplaint, while neighbors, older people who had known her all her life, girls with whom she had played in pinafores and boys with whom she had sweethearted during the spring and summer of adolescence, and newcomers to the town, looked after her on the street.