William Faulkner - Flags in the Dust

Thou wast happier in thy cage, happier...The corridor, with its rubber mat and identical closed doors expensively and importantly discreet; the stairway with its brass-bound steps and at each turning, a heavy brass receptacle in which cigarette butts and scraps of paper reposed upon tobacco-stained sand, all new, all smelling of recent varnish. There was afoyer of imitation oak and imitation marble; the street in an untempered glare of spring sunlight. The building too was new and an imitation of something else, or maybe a skillful and even more durable imitation of that, as was the whole town, the very spirit, the essence of which was crystallized in the courthouse building—an edifice imposing as a theatre drop, flamboyant and cheap and shoddy; obviously built without any definite plan by men without honesty or taste. It was a standing joke that it had cost $60,000, and the people who had paid for it retailed the story without anger, but on the contrary with a little frankly envious admiration.

Ten years ago the town was a hamlet, twelve miles from the railroad. Then a hardwood lumber concern had bought up the cypress swamps nearby and established a factory in the town. It was financed by eastern capital and operated by as plausible and affable a set of brigands as ever stole a county. They robbed the stockholders and the timber owners and one another and spent the money among the local merchants, who promptly caught the enthusiasm, and presently widows and orphans in New York and New England were buying Stutz cars and imported caviar and silk dresses and diamond watches at three prices, and the town bootleggers and the moonshiners in the adjacent swamps waxed rich, and every fourth year the sheriff’s office sold at public auction for the price of a Hollywood bungalow. People in the neighboring counties learned of all this and moved there and chopped all the trees down and built themselves mile after mile of identical frame houses with garage to match: the very air smelled of affluence and burning gasoline. Yes, there was money there, how much no two estimates ever agreed; whose, at any one given time, God Himselfcould not have said. But it was there, like that afflatus of rank fecundity above a foul and stagnant pool on which bugs dart spawning, die, are replaced in mid-darting; in the air, in men’s voices and gestures, seemingly to be had for the taking. That was why Belle had chosen it.

But for the time being Horace was utterly oblivious of its tarnished fury as he walked along the street toward the new, ugly yellow station, carrying his letter the words of which yet echoed derisively in his mind … Belle sends love … Belle sends love. He had made acquaintances “In spite of yourself,” Belle told him harshly. “Thinking you are better than other people.” Yes, he had answered. Yes, with a weariness too spent to argue with its own sense of integrity. But he had made a few, some of whom he now passed, was greeted, replied: merchants, another lawyer, his barber; a young man who was trying to sell him an automobile. Naturally Belle would … Belle sendslove … Belle sends … He still carried his letter in his hand and glancing at the bulletin board on the station wall he saw that the train was a little late, and he went on down the platform to where the mail car would stop and gave the letter to the mail carrier—a lank, goose-necked man with a huge pistol strapped to his thigh … Thou wast happier … The express agent came along, dragging his truck … in thy cage, happier …“Got another ‘un today?” he asked, greeting Horace.

“What?” Horace said. “Oh, good afternoon.”

“Got another ‘un today?” the other repeated.

“Yes,” Horace answered, watching the other swing the truck skillfully into position beside the rails Happier The sun was warm; already there was something of summer’s rankness. in it—a quality which, at home where among green and ancient treesand graver and more constant surroundings, dwelt quietude and the soul’s annealment, it had not even in July. Soon, soon, he said, and again he went voyaging alone from where his body leaned against a strange wall in a brief hiatus of the new harsh compulsions it now suffered This will not last always: I have made too little effort to change my fellow man’s actions and beliefs to have won a place in anyone’s plan of infinity In thy cage, happier?

The locomotive slid past, rousing him: he had not heard it, and the cars on rasping wheels! and from the door of the express car the cleric with a pencil stuck jauntily beneath his cap, flipped his hand at him. “Here you are, Professor,” he said, handing down first to the agent a small wooden crate from which moisture dripped. “Smelling a little stout, today, but the fish won’t mind that, will they?” Horace approached, his nostrils tightening a little. The clerk in the car door was watching him with friendly curiosity. “Say,” he asked, “what kind of city fish you got around here, that have to have mail-order bait?”

“It’s shrimp,” Horace explained

“Shrimp?” the other repeated, “Eat ‘em yourself, do you?” he asked with interest.

“Yes.Mywife’sveryfondofthem.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the clerk said heartily. “Ithought it was some kind of patent fish-bait youwere getting every Tuesday. Well, every man to histaste, I reckon. But I’ll take steak, myself. All right,Bud; grab it”

Horace signed the agent’s receipt and lifted the crate from the truck, holding it carefully away from himself. The smell invariably roused in him a faint but definite repulsion which he was not able to overcome, though Belle preferred shrimp above all foods. And it always seemed to him for hours afterwardthat the smell clung about his clothing, despite the fact that he knew better, knew that he had carried the package well clear of himself. He carried it so now, his elbow against-his side and his forearm at a slight, tense angle with the dripping weight.

Behind him the bell rang, and with the bitten, deep snorts of starting, the train moved. He looked back and saw the cars slide past, gaining speed, carrying his letter away and the quiet, the intimacy the writing and the touching of it, had brought him. But day after tomorrow he could write again … Belle sends love … Belle sends … Ah, well, we all respond to strings. And She would understand, it and the necessity for it, the dreadful need; She in her serene aloofness partaking of gods … Belle sends

The street from curb to curb was uptorn. It was in the throes of being paved. Along it lines of negroes labored with pick and shovel, swinging their tools in a languid rhythm, steadily and with a lazy unhaste that seemed to spend itself in snatches of plaintive minor chanting punctuated by short grunting ejaculations which (tied upon the sunny air and ebbed away from the languid rhythm of picks that struck not; shovels that did not dig. Further up the street a huge misshapen machine like an antediluvian nightmare clattered and groaned. It dominated the scene with its noisy and measured fury, but against this as against a heroic frieze, the negroes labored on, their chanting and their motions more soporific than a measured tolling of faraway bells.

His arm was becoming numb, but the first mark— a water plug—where he changed hands for the first time, was still a hundred yards away; and when he reached it and swapped the crate to the other hand, his fingers were dead of all sensation and his biceps was jumping a little within his sleeve. Which goes toprove the fallacy of all theories of physical training. According to that, every succeeding Tuesday he should be able to go a littlefurther without changing, until by Christmas he would be able to carry the package all the way home without changing hands; and by Christmas ten years, all the way back to Gulfport, where they came from. Prize, maybe. More letters behind his name, anyway, C.S. Carrier of Shrimp. H. Benbow, M.A., Ll.D., C.S. … Thou wast happier …