William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

It had touched the horizon when they lookeddown into the final valley where the railroad’s shining threads vanished among houses and trees, and along the air to them distantly, there came a slow, heavy explosion. “Still celebratin’,” the negro said.

They descended the finalhill, among houses, in the windows of which hung wreathes and paper bells, and whose stoops were littered with spent firecrackers; and went along streets where children in bright sweaters and jackets sped on shiny coasters and skates and wagons. Again a heavy explosion from the dusk ahead, and they debouched into the square with its Sabbath calm, littered too with shattered scraps of paper. It looked like that at home, he knew, with men and youths he had known from boyhood lounging the holiday away, drinking a little and shooting fireworks, giving nickels and dimes and quarters to negro boys who shouted Chris’mus gif! Chris’mus gif! as they passed; and after dark, somewhere a dance, with holly and mistletoe and paper streamers, and the girls he had always known with their new bracelets and watches and fans amid warmth and lights and music and glittering laughter. A small group stood on a corner, and as they passed and preceded by a sudden scurry among the group, yellow flame was stenciled abruptly on the twilight and the heavy explosion reverberated in sluggish echoes. The mules quickened against their collars and the wagon rattled on.

There were lights within the houses now, behind the wreathes and the rotund bells, and through the dusk voices called with mellow insistence; children’s voices replied, expostulant, reluctantly regretful. Then the station, where a bus and four or five cars stood aligned, and Bayard descended and the negro lifted down the sack.

“Much obliged,” Bayard said. “Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, whitefoiks.”

In the waiting room a stove glowed red hot and about the room stood cheerful groups, in sleek furs and overcoats, but he did not enter. He set the sack against the wall and tramped up and down the platform, warming his blood again. In both directions along the tracks green switch lights were steady in the dusk; a hands-breadth above the western trees the evening star was like an electric bulb. He tramped back and forth, glancing now and then into the ruddy windows, into the waiting room where the cheerful groups in their furs and overcoats gesticulated with festive though soundless animation, and into the colored waiting room, whose occupants sat patiently and murmurously about the stove in the dingy light As he turned here a voice spoke diffidently from the shadow beside the door. “Chris’mus gif, boss.” He took a coin from his pocket, and went on. Again from the square a firecracker exploded heavily, and above the trees a rocket arced, hung for a moment, then opened like a closed fist, spreading its golden and fading fingers upon the serene indigo sky without a sound.

Then the train came and brought its lighted windows to a jarring halt, and he picked up his sack again. And in the midst of a cheerful throng shouting goodbyes and holiday greetings to one another, he got aboard, unshaven, in his scarred boots and stained khaki pants, and his shabby, smoke-colored tweed jacket and his disreputable felt hat, and found a vacant seat and stowed the jug away beneath his legs.

FIVE

1

“...and since the essence of spring is loneliness and a little sadness and a sense of mild frustration, I suppose you do get a keener purifaction when a little nostalgia is thrown in for good measure. At home I always found myself remembering apple trees or green lanes or the color of the sea in other places, and I’d be sad that I couldn’t be everywhere at once, or that all the spring couldn’t be concentrated in one place, like Byron’s ladies’ mouths. But now I seem to be unified and projected upon one single and very definite object, which is something to be said for me, after all.” Horace’s pen ceased and he gazed at the sheet scrawled over with his practically illegible script, while the words he had just written echoed yet in his mind with a little gallant and whimsical sadness, and for the time being he had quitted the desk and the room and the town and all the crude and blatant newness into which his destiny had brought him, and again that wild and delicate futility of his roamed unchallenged through the lonely region into which it had at last concentrated its conflicting parts. Already the thick cables along the veranda eaves would be budding into small lilac matchpoints, and with no effort at all he could see the lawn below the cedars, splashed with randomnarcissi among random fading jonquils and gladioli waiting to bloom in turn.

But his body sat motionless, its hand with the arrested pen upon the scrawled sheet, the paper lying upon the yellow varnished surface of his new desk. The chair in which he sat was new too, as was the room with its dead white walls and imitation oak woodwork. All day long the sun fell upon it, untempered by any shade. In the days of early spring it had been pleasant, falling as it now did through his western window and across the desk where a white hyacinth bloomed in a bowl of glazed maroon pottery. But as he sat musing, staring out the window where, beyond a tarred roof that drank heat like a sponge and radiated it, against a brick wall a clump of ragged heaven trees lifted shabby, diffident bloom, he dreaded the long hot summer days of sunlight upon the roof directly above him, remembered his dim and musty office at home, in which a breeze seemed always to move, with its serried undisturbed rows of dusty books that seemed to emanate coolness and dimness even on the hottest days. And thinking of this, he was again lost from the harsh newness in which his body sat. The pen moved again.

“Perhaps fortitude is a sorry imitation of something worthwhile, after all To the So many who burrow along like moles in the dark, or like owls, to whom a candle-flame is a surfeit. But not those who carry peace along with them as the candle-flame carries light. I have always been ordered by words, but now it seems that I can even restore courage to my own cowardice by cozening it a little. I daresay you cannot read this as usual, or reading it, it will not mean anything to you. But you will have served your purpose anyway, thou still unravished bride of quietude.” Thou wast happier in thy cage, happier? Horace thought, looking at the words he had written and in which, as usual, he was washing one woman’s linen in the house of another. A thin breeze blew suddenly into the room; there was locust upon it, faintly sweet, and beneath it the paper stirred upon the desk, rousing him; and suddenly, as a man waking, he looked at his watch and replaced it and wrote rapidly:

“We are very glad to have little Belle with us. She likes it here: there is a whole family of little girls near door: stair steps of tow pigtails before whom it must be confessed that little Belle preens just a little; patronizes them. Children make all the difference in the world about a house. Too bad agents are not wise enough to supply rented houses with them. Particularly one like little Belle, so grave and shining and sort of irrelevantly and intensely mature, you know. But then, you don’t know her very well, do you? But we both are very glad to have her with us. I believe that Harry—” The pen ceased, and still poised, he sought the words that so rarely eluded him, realizing as he did so that, though one can lie about others with ready and extemporaneous promptitude, to lie about oneself requires deliberation and a careful choice of expression; Then he glanced again at his watch and scratched that out and wrote: “Belle sends love, O Serene.” and blotted it and folded it swiftly into an envelope and addressed and stamped it, and rose and took his hat.