William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

Forthright and inscrutable and unpredictable: sometimes she stayed an hour motionless before the fire while he sat nearby and did not dare touch her; sometimes she lay beside him while the firelight, fallen to a steady glow of coals, filled his bedroom with looming and motionless shadows until midnight or later, talking about her former lovers with a brutality that caused him hopeless and despairing angerand something of a child’s hurt disillusion; speaking of them with that same utter lack of vanity and conventional modesty with which she discussed her body, asking him to tell her again that he thought her body beautiful, asking him if he had ever seen a match for her legs, then taking him with a savage and carnivorous suddenness that left him spent. Yet all the while remote beyond that barrier of cold inscrutability which he was never able to break downs and rising at last, again that other feline and inaccessible self and departing without even the formality of a final kiss or a Goodbye and leaving him to wonder/ despite the evidences of her presence, whether he had not dreamed it, after all.

She made but one request of him: that he refrain from talking to her of love. “I’m tired of having to listen to it and talk and act a lot of childish stupidity,” she explained. “I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t care to.”

“You don’t think there is any such thing?” he asked.

“I’ve never found it. And if we can get anything from each other worth having, what’s the use in talking about it? And it’ll take a race of better people than we are to bear it, if there’s any such thing. Save that for Belle: you’ll probably need it.”

One night she did not depart at all That was the night she revealed another feline trait: that of a prowling curiosity about dark rooms. She had paused at Narcissa’s door, and although he tried to draw her onward, she opened the door and found the light switch and pressed it on. “Whose room is this?”

“Narcissa’s,” he answered shortly. “Come away.”

“Oh, your sister’s. The one that married that Sartoris” She examined the room quietly. “I’d like to have known that man,” she said in a musing tone. “Ithink I’d be good for him, Marrying women, then leaving them after a month or two. Only one man ever left me,” she stated calmly. “I was practically a child, or that wouldn’t have...Yes, I’d have been just the thing for him.” She entered the room; he followed and took her arm again.

“Come away, Joan.”

“But I don’t know,” she added. “Maybe it’s a good thing he’s gone, after all. For both of us.”

“Yes. Come away.”

She turned her head and stared at him with her level inscrutable eyes, beneath the bronze disorder of her hair. “Men are funny animals” she said. “You carry so much junk around with you.” There was in her eyes a cold derisive curiosity. “What do you call it? sacrilege? desecration?”

“Come away,” he repeated.

Next day, in the gray December forenoon among the musty books in his office, the reaction found him. It was more than reaction: it was revulsion, and he held a spiritual stock-taking with a sort of bleak derision: for a moment, in company with the sinister gods themselves, he looked down upon Horace Benbow as upon an antic and irresponsible worm. It was worse; it was conduct not even becoming a college sophomore—he, who had thought to have put all such these ten years behind him; and he thought of his sister and he felt unclean. On the way home at noon he saw Harry Mitchell approaching, and he ducked into a store and hid—a thing Belle had never caused him to do.

He would not go to hisroom, where the impact of her presence must yet linger, and Eunice served his meal with her face averted, emanating disapproval and reproach; and he angered slowly and asked herthe direct question. “Has Mrs. Heppleton gone yet, Eunice?”

“I don’t know, suh,” Eunice answered, still without looking at him. She turned doorward.

“You don’t know when she left?”

“I don’t know, suh,” Eunice repeated doggedly, and the swing door slapped behind her in dying oscillations.

But he would not mount to his room, and soon he was back down town again. It was a gray, raw day, following the two recent weeks of bright frosty weather. Christmas was not a Week away, and already the shop windows bloomed in toy fairylands, with life in its mutations in miniature among cedar branches and cotton batting and dusted over with powdered tinsel, amid which Santa Claus in his myriad avatars simpered in fixed and rosy benignance; and with fruit and cocoanuts and giant sticks of peppermint; and fireworks of all kinds—roman candles and crackers and pinwheels; and about the muddy square fetlock-deep horses stood hitched to wagons laden with berried holly and mistletoe.

He was too restless to remain in one place, and through the short afternoon, on trivial pretexts or on no pretext at all, he descended the stairs and walked along the streets among the slow throngs of black and white in the first throes of the long winter vacation; and at last he realized that he was hoping to see her, realized it with longing and with dread, looking along the street before him for a glimpse of her shapeless marten coat and the curbed wild blaze of her hair, and the lithe and purposeful arrogance of her carriage, ready to flee when he did so.

But by the time he reached home in the early dusk the dread was still there, but it was only the savor ofthe longing, and without even pausing to remove his hat and coat he went to the telephone in its chill and darkling alcove beneath the stairs. And he stood with the chill receiver to his ear and watching the cloudy irregularity of his breath upon the nickel mouthpiece, waiting until out of the twilight and the chill the lazy purring of her voice should come. After a time he asked central to ring again, with polite impatience. He could hear the other instrument shrill again and he thought of her long body rising from its warm nest in her chair before a fire somewhere in the quiet house, imagined lie could hear her feet on stairs nearer and nearer “Now. Now she is lifting her hand to the receiver now Now.” But it was Rachel, the cook. Naw, suh, Miz Heppleton ain’t here. Yes, suh, she gone away. Suh? Naw, suh, she ain’t comin’ back. She went off on de evenin’ train. Naw, suh, Rachel didn’t know where she was going.

It used to be that he’d fling his coat and hat down and Narcissa would come along presently and hang them up. But already bachelordom was getting him house-broke—accomplishing what affection never had and never would—and he hung his coat, in the pocket of which an unopened letter from Belle lay forgotten, carefully in the closet beneath the stairs, fumbling patiently with his chilled hands until he found a vacant hook. Then he mounted the stairs and opened his door and entered the cold room where between the secret walls she lingered yet in a hundred palpable ways—in the mirror above his chest of drawers, in the bed, the chairs; on the deep rug before the hearth where she had crouched naked and drowsing like a cat. The fire had burned out; the ashes were cold and the room was icy chill: outside, the graying twilight. He built up the fire and drewhis chair close to the hearth and sat before it, his thin delicate hands spread to the crackling blaze.

4

…this time it was a Ford car, and Bayard saw its wild skid as the driver jerked it across the treacherous thawing road, and the driver’s gaping mouth, and in the rushing moment and with brief amusement, between the man’s cravatless collar and the woman’s stocking wrapped about his head beneath his hat and tied under his chin, his Adam’s apple like a scared puppy in a tow sack. Then this flashed past and Bayard wrenched the wheel, and the stalled Ford swam sickeningly into view again as the big car slewed greasily upon the clay surface, its declutched engine roaring. Then the other car swam away again as he wrenched the wheel over and slammed the clutch out for more stability; and again that sickening, unhurried rush as the car refused to regain its feet and the depthless December world swept laterally across his vision. Old Bayard lurched against him again: from the corner of his eye he could see the fellow’s hand clutching at the edge of the door. Now they were facing the bluff on which the cemetery lay; directly over them John Sartoris’ effigy lifted its florid stone gesture, and from among motionless cedars gazed out upon the valley where for two miles the railroad he had built ran beneath his carven eyes. Bayard wrenched the wheel again.