Absalom, Absalom!

cosmopolitan New Orleans or bucolic Mississippi: his own inherited and heritable Florentine lamps and gilded toilet seats and tufted mirrors, or a little jerkwater college not ten years old; champagne in the octoroon's boudoir or whiskey on a harsh new table in a monk's cell and a country youth, a bucolic heir apparent who had probably never spent a dozen nights outside of his paternal house (unless perhaps to lie fully dressed beside a fire in the woods listening to dogs running) until he came to school, whom he watched aping his clothing carriage speech and all and (the youth) completely unaware that he was doing it, who (the youth) over the bottle one night said, blurted ‐ no, not blurted: it would be fumbling, groping: and he (the cosmopolite ten years the youth's senior almost, lounging in one of the silk robes the like of which the youth had never seen before and believed that only women wore) watching the youth blush fiery red yet still face him, still look him straight in the eye while he fumbled, groped, blurted with abrupt complete irrelevance: "If I had a brother, I wouldn't want him to be a younger brother" and he: "Ah?" and the youth: "No. I would want him to be older than me" and he: "No son of a landed father wants an older brother" and the youth: "Yes.

I do," looking straight at the other, the esoteric, the sybarite, standing (the youth) now, erect, thin (because he was young), his face scarlet but his head high and his eyes steady: "Yes. And I would want him to be just like you" and he: "Is that so? The whiskey's your side. Drink or pass."

'And now,' Shreve said, 'we're going to talk about love." But he didn't need to say that either, any more than he had needed to specify which he meant by he, since neither of them had been thinking about anything else; all that had gone before just so much that had to be overpassed and none else present to overpass it but them, as someone always has to rake the leaves up before you can have the bonfire. That was why it did not matter to either of them which one did the talking, since it was not the talking alone which did it, performed and accomplished the overpassing, but some happy marriage of speaking and hearing wherein each before the demand, the requirement, forgave condoned and forgot the faulting of the other ‐ faultings both in the creating of this shade whom they discussed (rather, existed in) and in the hearing and sifting and discarding the false and conserving what seemed true, or fit the preconceived ‐ in order to overpass to love, where there might be paradox and inconsistency but nothing fault nor false. 'And now, love. He must have known all about her before he ever saw her ‐ what she looked like, her private hours in that provincial women's world that even men of the family were not supposed to know a great deal about; he must have learned it without even having to ask a single question. Jesus, it must have kind of boiled out all over him. There must have been nights and nights while Henry was learning from him how to lounge about a bedroom in a gown and slippers such as women wore, in a faint though unmistakable effluvium of scent such as women used, smoking a cigar almost as a woman might smoke it, yet withal such an air of indolent and lethal assurance that only the most reckless man would have gratuitously drawn the comparison (and with no attempt to teach, train, play the mentor on his part ‐

and then maybe yes; maybe who could know what times he looked at Henry's face and thought, not there but for the intervening leaven of that blood which we do not have in common is my skull, my brow, sockets, shape and angle of jaw and chin and some of my thinking behind it, and which he could see in my face in his turn if he but knew to look as I know but there, just behind a little, obscured a little by that alien blood whose admixing was necessary in order that he exist is the face of the man who shaped us both out of that blind chancy darkness which we call the future; there ‐

there ‐ at any moment second, I shall penetrate by something of will and intensity and dreadful need, and strip that alien leavening from it and look not on my brother's face whom I did not know I possessed and hence never missed, but my father's, out of the shadow of whose absence my spirit's posthumeity has never escaped‐ at what moment thinking, watching the eagerness which was without abjectness, the humility which surrendered no pride ‐ the entire proffering of the spirit of which the unconscious aping of clothes and speech and mannerisms was but the shell ‐ thinking what cannot I do with this willing flesh and bone if I wish; this flesh and bone and spirit which stemmed from the same source that mine did, but which sprang in quiet peace and contentment and ran in steady even though monotonous sunlight, where that which he bequeathed me sprang in hatred and outrage and unforgiving and ran in shadow ‐ what could I not mold of this malleable and eager clay which that father himself could not to what shape of what good there might, must, be in that blood and none handy to take and mold that portion of it in me until too late: of what moments when he might have told himself that it was nonsense, it could not be true; that such coincidences only happened in books, thinking the weariness, the fatalism, the incorrigible cat for solitude ‐ That young clodhopper bastard. How shall I get rid of him: and then the voice, the other voice: You don't mean that: and he: No. But I do mean the clodhopper bastard) and the days, the afternoons, while they rode together (and Henry aping him here too, who was the better horseman, who maybe had nothing of what Bon would have called style but who had done more of it, to whom a horse was as natural as walking, who would ride anything anywhere and at anything) while he must have watched himself being swamped and submerged in the bright unreal flood of Henry's speech, translated (the three of them: himself and Henry and the sister whom he had never seen and perhaps did not even have any curiosity to see) into a world like a fairy tale in which nothing else save them existed, riding beside Henry, listening, needing to ask no questions, to prompt to further speech in any manner that youth who did not even suspect that he and the man beside him might be brothers, who each time his breath crossed his vocal chords was saying From now on mine and my sister's house will be your house and mine and my sister's lives your life, wondering (Bon) or maybe not wondering at all ‐ how if conditions were reversed and Henry was the stranger and he (Bon) the scion and still knew what he suspected, if he would say the same; then (Bon) agreeing at last, saying at last, "All right. I'll come home with you for Christmas," not to see the third inhabitant of Henry's fairy tale, not to see the sister because he had not once thought of her: he had merely listened about her: but thinking So at last I shall see him, whom it seems I was bred up never to expect to see, whom I had even learned to live without, thinking maybe how he would walk into the house and see the man who made him and then he would know; there would be that flash, that instant of indisputable recognition between them and he would know for sure and forever thinking maybe That's all I want. He need not even acknowledge me; I will let him understand just as quickly that he need not do that, that I do not expect that, will not be hurt by that, just as he will let me know that quickly that I am his son, thinking maybe, maybe again with that expression you might call smiling but which was not, which was just something that even just a clodhopper bastard was not intended to see beyond: I am my mother's son, at least: I do not seem to know what I want either. Because he knew exactly What he wanted; it was just the saying of it ‐ the physical touch even though in secret, hidden ‐ the living touch of that flesh warmed before he was born by the same blood which it had bequeathed him to warm his own flesh with, to be bequeathed by him in turn to run hot and loud in veins and limbs after that first flesh and then his own were dead. So the Christmas came and he and Henry rode the forty miles to Sutpen's Hundred, with Henry still talking, still keeping distended and light and iridescent with steady breathing that fairy balloon‐vacuum in which the three of them existed, lived, moved even maybe, in attitudes without flesh ‐ himself and the friend and the sister whom the friend had never seen and (though Henry did not know it) had not even thought about yet but only listened about from behind the more urgent thinking, and Henry probably not even noticing that the nearer they came to home the less Bon talked, had to say on any subject, and maybe even (and certainly Henry would not know this) listening less. And so he went into the house: and maybe somebody looking at him would have seen on his face an expression a good deal like the one ‐that proffering with humility yet with pride too, of complete surrender ‐ which he had used to see on Henry's face, and maybe he telling himself I not only don't know what it is I want but apparently I am a good deal younger than I thought also: and saw face to face the man who might be his father, and nothing happened ‐ no shock, no hot communicated flesh that speech would have been too slow even to impede ‐ nothing. And he spent ten days there, not only the esoteric, the sybarite, the steel blade in the silken tessellated sheath which Henry had begun to ape at the University, but the object of art, the mold and mirror of form mad fashion which Mrs Sutpen (so your father said) accepted him as and insisted (didn't your father say?) that he be (and would have purchased him as and paid for him with Judith even, if there had been no other bidder among the four of them or didn't your father say?) and which he did remain to her until he disappeared, taking Henry with him, and she never saw him again and war and trouble and grief and bad food filled her days until maybe she didn't even remember after a while that she had ever forgot him. (And the girl, the sister, the virgin ‐ Jesus, who to know what she saw that afternoon when they rode up the drive, what prayer, what maiden meditative dream ridden up out of whatever fabulous land, not in harsh stove iron but the silken and tragic Lancelot nearing thirty, ten years older than she was and wearied, sated with what experiences and pleasures, which Henry's letters must have created for her.) And the day came to depart and no sign yet; he and Henry rode away and still no sign, no more sign at parting than when he had seen it first, in that face where he might (he would believe) have seen for himself the truth and so would have needed no sign, if it hadn't been for the beard; no sign in the eyes which could see his face because there was no beard to hide it, could have seen the truth if it were there: yet no flicker in them: and so he knew it was in his face because he knew that the other had seen it there just exactly as Henry was to know the next Christmas eve in the library that his father was not lying by the fact that the father said nothing, did nothing. Maybe he even thought, wondered if perhaps that was not why the beard, if maybe the other had not hidden behind that beard against this very day, and if so, why? why? thinking But why? Why? since he wanted so little, could have understood if the other had wanted the signal to be in secret, would have been quick and glad to let it be in secret even if he could not have understood why, thinking in the middle of this My God, I am young, young, and I didn't even know it; they didn't even tell me, that I was young, feeling that same despair and shame like when you have to watch your father fail in physical courage, thinking, It should have been me that failed; me, I, not he who stemmed from that blood which we both bear before it could have become corrupt and tainted by whatever it was in mother's that he could not brook. ‐ Wait,' Shreve cried, though Quentin had not spoken: it had been merely some quality, some gathering of Quentin's still laxed and hunched figure which presaged speech, because Shreve said Wait. Wait. before Quentin could have begun to speak. 'Because he hadn't even looked at her. Oh, he had seen her all right, he had had plenty of opportunity for that; he could not have helped but that because Mrs Sutpen would have seen to it ‐ ten days of that kind of planned and arranged and executed privacies like the campaigns of dead generals in the textbooks, in libraries and parlors and drives in the buggy in the afternoons ‐ all planned three months ago when Mrs Sutpen read Henry's first letter with Bon's name in it, until maybe even Judith too began to feel like the other one to a pair of goldfish: and him even talking to her too, or what talking he could have found to do to a country girl who probably never saw a man young or old before who sooner or later didn't smell like manure; talking to her about like he would talk to the old dame on the gold chairs in the parlor, except that in the one case he would have to make all the conversation and in the other he would not even be able to make his own escape but would have to wait for Henry to come and get him.

And maybe he had even thought about her by that time; maybe at the times when he would be telling himself it cant be so; he could not look at me like this every day and make no sign if it were so he would even tell himself She would be easy like when you have left the champagne on the supper table and are walking toward the whiskey on the sideboard and you happen to pass a cup of lemon sherbet on a tray and you look at the Sherbet and tell yourself, That would be easy too only who wants it. Does that suit you?" 'But it's not love,' Quentin said.

'Because why not? Because listen. What was it the old dame, the Aunt Rosa, told you about how there are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that maybe are and it don't matter a damn whether they are or not?

That was it. He just didn't have time yet. Jesus, he must have known it would be. Like that lawyer thought, he wasn't a fool; the trouble was, he wasn't the kind of not‐fool the lawyer thought he would be. He must have known it was going to happen. It would be like you passed that sherbet and maybe you knew you would even reach the sideboard and the whiskey, yet you knew that tomorrow morning you would want that sherbet, then you reached the whiskey and you knew you wanted that sherbet now; maybe you didn't even go to the sideboard, maybe you even looked back at that champagne on the supper table among the dirty haviland and the crumpled damask, and all of a sudden you knew you didn't want to go back there even. It would be no question of choosing, having to choose between the champagne or whiskey and the sherbet, but all of a sudden (it would be spring then, in that country where he had never spent a spring before and you said North Mississippi is a little harder country than Louisiana, with dogwood and violets and the early scentless flowers but the earth and the nights still a little cold and the hard tight sticky buds like young girls' nipples on alder and Judas trees and beech and maple and even something in the cedars like he never saw before) you find that you don't want anything but that sherbet and that you haven't been wanting anything else but that and you have been wanting that pretty hard for some time ‐ besides knowing that that sherbet is there for you to take. Not just for anybody to take but for you to take, knowing just from looking at that cup that it would be like a flower that, if any other hand reached for it, it would have thorns on it but not for your hand; and him not used to that since all the other cups that had been willing and easy for him to take up hadn't contained sherbet but champagne or at least kitchen wine. And more than that. There was the knowing what he suspected might be so, or not knowing if it was so or not. And who to say if it wasn't maybe the possibility of incest, because who (without a sister: I don't know about the others) has been in love and not discovered the vain evanescence of the fleshly encounter; who has not had to realize that when the brief all is done you must retreat from both love and pleasure, gather up your own rubbish and refuse ‐ the hats and pants and shoes which you drag through the world ‐ and retreat since the gods condone and practise these and the dreamy immeasurable coupling which floats oblivious above the trameling and harried instant, the: was‐not: is: was: is a perquisite only of balloony and weightless elephants and whales: but maybe if there were sin too maybe you would not be permitted to escape, uncouple, return. ‐

Aint that right?" He ceased, he could have been interrupted easily now. Quentin could have spoke now, but Quentin did not. He just sat as before, his hands in his trousers pockets, his shoulders hugged inward and hunched, his face lowered and he looking somehow curiously smaller than he actually was because of his actual height and spareness ‐ that quality of delicacy about the bones, articulation, which even at twenty still had something about it, some last echo about it, of adolescence ‐ that is, as compared with the cherubic burliness of the other who faced him, who looked younger, whose very superiority in bulk and displacement made him look even younger, as a plump boy of twelve who outweighs the other by twenty or thirty pounds still looks younger than the boy of fourteen who had that plumpness once and lost it, sold it (whether with his consent or not) for that state of virginity which is neither boy's nor girl's. 'I don't know,' Quentin said. 'All right,'

Shreve said. 'Maybe I don't either. Only, Jesus, some day you are bound to fall in love. They just wouldn't beat you that way. It would be like if God had got Jesus born and saw that he had the carpenter tools and then never gave him anything to build with them. Dont you believe that?"

'I don't know,' Quentin said. He did not move. Shreve looked at him. Even while they were not talking their breaths in the tomblike air vaporized gently and quietly. The chimes for midnight would have rung some time ago now.

'You mean, it don't matter to you?" Quentin did not answer. 'That's right.

Dont say it. Because I would know you are lying. ‐ All right then. Listen.

Because he never had to worry about the love because that would take care of itself. Maybe he knew there was a fate, a doom on him, like what the old Aunt Rosa told you about some things that just have to be whether they are or not, just to balance the books, write Paid on the old sheet so that whoever keeps them can take it out of the ledger and burn it, get rid of it. Maybe he knew then that whatever the old man had done, whether he meant well or ill by it, it wasn't going to be the old man who would have to pay the check; and now that the old man was bankrupt with the incompetence of age, who should do the paying if not his sons, his get, because wasn't it done that way in the old days; the old Abraham full of years and weak and incapable now of further harm, caught at last and the captains and the collectors saying, "Old man, we don't want you" and Abraham would say, "Praise the Lord, I have raised about me sons to bear the burden of mine iniquities and persecutions; yea, perhaps even to restore my flocks and herds from the hand of the ravisher: that I might rest mine eyes upon my goods and chattels, upon the generations of them and of my descendants increased an hundred fold as my soul goeth out from me." He knew all the time that the love would take care of itself. Maybe that was why he didn't have to think about her during those three months between that September and that Christmas while Henry talked about her to him, saying every time he breathed: Hers and my lives are to exist within and upon yours; did not need to waste any time over the love after it happened, backfired on him, why he never bothered to write her any letters (except that last one) which she would want to save, why he never actually proposed to her and gave her a ring for Mrs Sutpen to show around. Because the fate was on her too: the same old Abraham. who was so old and weak now nobody would want him in the flesh on any debt; maybe he didn't even have to wait for that Christmas to see her to know this; maybe that's what it was that came out of the three months of Henry's talking that he heard without listening to: I am not hearing about a young girl, a virgin; I am hearing about a narrow delicate fenced virgin field already furrowed and bedded so that all I shall need to do is drop the seeds in, caress it smooth again, saw her that Christmas and knew it for certain and then forgot it, went back to school and did not even remember that he had forgotten it, because he did not have time then; maybe it was just one day in that spring you told about when he stopped and said, right quiet: All right. I want to go to bed with who might be my sister.

All right and then forgot that too. Because he didn't have time. That is, he didn't have anything else but time, because he had to wait.

But not for her. That was all fixed. It was the other. Maybe he thought it would be in the mail bag each time the nigger rode over from Sutpen's Hundred, and Henry believing it was the letter from her that he was waiting for, when what he was thinking was Maybe he will write it then. He would just have to write "I am your father. Burn this" and I would do it. Or if not that, a sheet, a scrap of paper with the one word "Charles" in his hand, and I would know what he meant and he would not even have to ask me to burn it. Or a lock of his hair or a paring from his fingernail and I would know them because I believe now that I have known what his hair and his fingernails would look like all my life, could choose that lock and that paring out of a thousand. And it did not come, and his letter went to her every two weeks and hers came back to him, and maybe he thought If one of mine to her should come back to me unopened then. That would be a sign. And that didn't happen: and then Henry began to talk about his stopping at Sutpen's Hundred for a day or so on his way home and he said all right to it, said It will be Henry who will get the letter, the letter saying it is inconvenient for me to come at that time; so apparently he does not intend to acknowledge me as his son, but at least I shall have forced him to admit that I am. And that one did not come either and the date was set and the family at Sutpen's Hundred notified of it and that letter did not come either and he thought It will be then; I wronged him; maybe this is what he has been waiting for and maybe his heart sprang then, maybe he said Yes. Yes. I will renounce her; I will renounce love and all; that will be cheap, cheap, even though he say to me "never look upon my face again; take my love and my acknowledgement in secret, and go" I will do that; I will not even demand to know of him what it was my mother did that justified his action toward her and me. So the day came and he and Henry rode the forty miles again, into the gates and up the drive to the house. He knew what would be there the woman whom he had seen once and seen through, the girl whom he had seen through without even having to see once, the man whom he had seen daily, watched out of his fearful intensity of need and had never penetrated ‐ the mother who had taken Henry aside before they had been six hours in the house on that Christmas visit and informed him of the engagement almost before the fiance had had time to associate the daughter's name with the daughter's face: so that probably before they even reached school again, and without his being aware that he had done so, Henry had already told Bon what was in his mother's mind, (who had already told Bon what was in his); so that maybe before they even started on Bon's second visit (It would be June now and what would it be in North Mississippi? what was it you said? the magnolias in bloom and the mockingbirds, and in fifty years more, after they had gone and fought it and lost it and come back home, the Decoration Day and the veterans in the neat brushed handironed gray and the spurious bronze medals that never meant anything to begin with, and the chosen young girls in white dresses bound at the waist with crimson sashes and the band would play Dixie and all the old doddering men would yell that you would not have thought would have had wind enough to get there, walk down town to sit on the rostrum even)

‐ it would be June now, with the magnolias and mockingbirds in the moonlight and the curtains blowing in the June air of Commencement, and the music, fiddles, and triangles, inside among the swirling and dipping hoops: and Henry would be a little tight, that should have been saying "I demand to know your intentions toward my sister" but wasn't saying it, instead maybe blushing again even in the moonlight, but standing straight and blushing because when you are proud enough to be humble you don't have to cringe (who every time he breathed over his vocal chords he was saying We belong to you; do as you will with us), saying "I used to think that I would hate the man that I would have to look at every day and whose every move and action and speech would say to me, I have seen and touched parts of your sister's body that you will never see and touch: and now I know that I shall hate him and that's why I want that man to be you," knowing that Bon would know what he meant, was trying to say, tell him, thinking, telling himself (Henry): Not just because he is older than I am and has known more than I shall ever know and has remembered more of it; but because of my own free will, and whether I knew it at the time or not does not matter, I gave my life and Judith's both to him ‐'

'That's still not love,' Quentin said.

'All right,' Shreve said. 'Just listen. ‐ They rode the forty miles and into the gates and up to the house. And this time Sutpen wasn't even there.

And Ellen didn't even know where he had gone, believing blandly and volubly that he had gone to Memphis or maybe even to Saint Louis on business, and Henry and Judith not even caring that much, and only he, Bon, to know where Sutpen had gone, saying to himself Of course; he wasn't sure; he had to go there to make sure, telling himself that loud now, loud and fast too so he would not, could not, hear the thinking, the But if he suspected, why not have told me? I would have done that, gone to him first, who have the blood after it was tainted and corrupt by whatever it was in mother; loud and fast now, telling himself That's what it is; maybe he has gone on ahead to wait for me; he left no message for me here because the others are not to suspect yet and he knows that I will know at once where he is when I find him gone, thinking of the two of them, the somber vengeful woman who was his mother and the grim rocklike man who had looked at him every day for ten days with absolutely no alteration of expression at all, facing one another in grim armistice after almost thirty years in that rich baroque drawing room in that house which he called home since apparently everybody seemed to have to have a home, the man whom he was now sure was his father not humble now either (and he, Bon, proud of that), not saying even now I was wrong but I admit that it is so Jesus, think of his heart then, during those two days, with the old gal throwing Judith at him every minute now because she had been spreading the news of the engagement confidentially through the county ever since Christmas ‐ didn't your father say how she had even taken Judith to Memphis in the spring to buy the trousseau? and Judith neither having to accede to the throwing nor to resist it but just being, just existing and breathing like Henry did who maybe one morning during that spring waked up and lay right still in the bed and took stock, added the figures and drew the balance and told himself, All right. I am trying to make myself into what I think he wants me to be; he can do anything he wants to with me; he has only to tell me what to do and I will do it; even though what he asked me to do looked to me like dishonor, I would still do it, only Judith, being a female and so wiser than that, would not even consider dishonor: she would just say, All right. I will do anything he might ask me to do and that is why he will never ask me to do anything that I consider dishonorable: so that (maybe he even kissed her that time, the first time she had ever been kissed maybe and she too innocent to be coy or modest or even to know that she had been temporized with, maybe afterward just looking at him with a kind of peaceful and blank surprise at the fact that your sweetheart apparently kissed you the first time like your brother would ‐ provided of course that your brother ever thought of, could be brought to, kissing you on the mouth) ‐ so that when the two days were up and he was gone again and Ellen shrieking at her, "What? No engagement, no troth, no ring?" she would be too astonished even to lie about it because that would be the first time it would have occurred to her that there had been no proposal. ‐ Think of his heart then, while he rode to the River, and then on the steamboat itself where he walked up and down the deck, feeling through the deck the engines driving him nearer and nearer day and night to the moment which he must have realized now he had been waiting for ever since he had got big enough to comprehend. Of course every now and then he would have to say it pretty fast and loud, That's all it is. He just wants to make sure first to drown out the old But why do it this way? Why not back there? He knows that I shall never make any claim upon any part of what he now possesses, gained at the price of what sacrifice and endurance and scorn (so they told me; not he: they) only he knows; knows that so well that it would never have occurred to him just as he knows it would never occur to me that this might be his reason, who is not only generous but ruthless, who must have surrendered everything he and mother owned to her and to me as the price of repudiating her, not because the doing it this way hurt him, flouted him and kept him in suspense that much unnecessary longer, because he didn't matter; whether he was irked or even crucified didn't matter: it was the fact that he had to be kept constantly reminded that he would not have done it this way himself, yet he had stemmed from the blood after whatever it was his mother had been or done had tainted and corrupted it. Nearer and nearer, until suspense and puzzlement and haste and all seemed blended into one sublimation of passive surrender in which he thought only All right. All right. Even this may, Even if he wants to do it this may. I will promise never to see her again. Never to see him again. Then he reached home. And he never learned if Sutpen had been there or not. He never knew. He believed it, but he never knew ‐ his mother the same somber unchanged fierce paranoiac whom he had left in September, from whom he could learn nothing by indirection and whom he dared not ask outright ‐

the very fact that he saw through the skillful questions of the lawyer (as to how he had liked the school and the people of that country and how perhaps ‐ or had he not perhaps? he had made friends up there among the country families) only that much more proof to him at that time that Sutpen had not been there, or at least the lawyer was not aware that he had, since now that he believed he had fathomed the lawyer's design in sending him to that particular school to begin with, he saw nothing in the questions to indicate that the lawyer had learned anything new since. (Or what he could have learned in that interview with the lawyer, because it would be a short one; it would be next to the shortest one ever to transpire between them, the shortest one of all next to the last one of course, the one which would occur in the next summer, when Henry would be with him.) Because the lawyer would not dare risk asking him outright, just as he (Bon) did not dare to ask his mother outright. Because, though the lawyer believed him to be rather a fool than dull or dense, yet even he (the lawyer) never for one moment believed that even Bon was going to be the kind of a fool he was going to be. So he told the lawyer nothing and the lawyer told him nothing, and the summer passed and September came and still the lawyer (his mother too) had not once asked him if he wanted to return to the school. So that at last he had to say it himself, that he intended to return; and maybe he knew that he had lost that move since there was nothing whatever in the lawyer's face save an agent's acquiescence. So he returned to school, where Henry was waiting (oh yes; waiting) for him, who did not even say "You didn't answer my letters. You didn't even write to Judith" who had already said What my sister and I have and are belongs to you but maybe he did write to Judith now, by the first nigger post which rode to Sutpen's Hundred, about how it had been an uneventful summer and hence nothing to write about, with maybe Charles Bon plain and inelidable on the outside of the envelope and he thinking He will have to see that. Maybe he will send it back thinking Maybe if it comes back nothing will stop me then and so maybe at last I will know what I am going to do. But it didn't come back. And the others didn't come back. And the fall passed and Christmas came and they rode again to Sutpen's Hundred and this time Sutpen was not there again, he was in the field, he had gone to town, he was hunting ‐something; Sutpen not there when they rode up and Bon knew he had not expected him to be there, saying Now. Now. Now. It will come now. It will come this time, and I am young, young, because I still don't know what I am going to do. So maybe what he was doing that twilight (because he knew that Sutpen had returned, was now in the house; it would be like a wind, something, dark and chill, breathing upon him and he stopping, grave, quiet, alert, thinking What? What is it? Then he would know; he could feel the other entering the house, and he would let his held breath go quiet and easy, a profound exhalation, his heart quiet too) in the garden while he walked with Judith and talked to her, gallant and elegant and automatic (and Judith thinking about that like she thought about that first kiss back in the summer: So that's it. That's what love is, bludgeoned once more by disappointment but still unbowed) ‐ maybe what he was doing there now was waiting, telling himself Maybe even yet he will send for me. At least say it to me even though he knew better: He is in the library now, he has sent the nigger for Henry, now Henry is entering the room: so that maybe he stopped and faced her, with something in his face that was smiling now, and took her by the elbows and turned her, easy and gentle, until she faced the house, and said "Go. I wish to be alone to think about love" and she went just as she took the kiss that day, with maybe the feel of the flat of his hand light and momentary upon her behind. And he stood there facing the house until Henry came out, and they looked at one another for a while with no word said and then turned and walked together through the garden, across the lot and into the stable, where maybe there was a nigger there and maybe they saddled the two horses themselves and waited until the house nigger came with the two repacked saddlebags. And maybe he didn't even say then, "But he sent no word to me?"'

Shreve ceased. That is, for all the two of them, Shreve and Quentin, knew he had stopped, since for all the two of them knew he had never begun, since it did not matter (and possibly neither of them conscious of the distinction) which one had been doing the talking. So that now it was not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas Eve: four of them and then just two ‐ Charles‐Shreve and Quentin‐Henry, the two of them both believing that Henry was thinking He (meaning his father) has destroyed us all, not for one moment thinking He (meaning Bon) must have known or at least suspected this all the time; that's why he has acted as he has, why he did not answer my letters last summer nor write to Judith, why he has never asked her to marry him; believing that that must have occurred to Henry, certainly during that moment after Henry emerged from the house and he and Bon looked at one another for a while without a word then walked down to the stable and saddled the horses, but that Henry had just taken that in stride because he did not yet believe it even though he knew that it was true, because he must have now understood with complete despair the secret of his whole attitude toward Bon from that first instinctive moment when he had seen him a year and a quarter ago; he knew, yet he did not, had to refuse to, believe. So it was four of them who rode the two horses through that night and then across the bright frosty North Mississippi Christmas day, in something very like pariah‐hood passing the plantation houses with sprigs of holly thrust beneath the knockers on the doors and mistletoe hanging from the chandeliers and bowls of eggnog and toddy on tables in the halls and the blue unwinded wood smoke standing above the plastered chimneys of the slave quarters, to the River and the steamboat.

There would be Christmas on the boat too: the same holly and mistletoe, the same eggnog and toddy; perhaps, doubtless, a Christmas supper and a ball, but not for them: the two of them in the dark and the cold standing at the guard rail above the dark water and still not talking since there was nothing to say, the two of them (the four of them) held in that probation, that suspension, by Henry who knew but still did not believe, who was going deliberately to look upon and prove to himself that which, so Shreve and Quentin believed, would be like death for him to learn. So it was four of them still who got off the boat in New Orleans, which Henry had never seen before (whose entire cosmopolitan experience, apart from his sojourn at the school, consisted probably of one or two trips to Memphis with his father to buy livestock or slaves) and had no time to look at now ‐

Henry who knew yet did not believe, and Bon whom Mr Compson had called a fatalist but who, according to Shreve and Quentin, did not resist Henry's dictum and design for the reason that he neither knew nor cared what Henry intended to do because he had long since realized that he did not know yet what he himself was going to do ‐ four of them who sat in that drawing room of baroque and fusty magnificence which Shreve had invented and which was probably true enough, while the Haiti‐born daughter of the French sugar planter and the woman whom Sutpen's first father‐in‐law had told him was a Spaniard (the slight dowdy woman with untidy gray‐streaked raven hair coarse as a horse's tail, with parchment‐colored skin and implacable pouched black eyes which alone showed no age because they showed no forgetting, whom Shreve and Quentin had likewise invented and which was likewise probably true enough) told them nothing because she did not need to because she had already told it, who did not say, "My son is in love with your sister?" but "So she has fallen in love with him," and then sat laughing harshly and steadily at Henry who could not have lied to her even if he would have, who did not even have to answer at all either Yes or No.

Four of them there, in that room in New Orleans in 1860, just as in a sense there were four of them here in this tomblike room in Massachusetts in 1910. And Bon may have, probably did, take Henry to call on the octoroon mistress and the child, as Mr Compson said, though neither Shreve nor Quentin believed that the visit affected Henry as Mr Compson seemed to think. In fact, Quentin did not even tell Shreve what his father had said about the visit. Perhaps Quentin himself had not been listening when Mr Compson related it that evening at home; perhaps at that moment on the gallery in the hot September twilight Quentin took that in stride without even hearing it just as Shreve would have, since both he and Shreve believed ‐ and were probably right in this too ‐ that the octoroon and the child would have been to Henry only something else about Bon to be, ‐not envied but aped if that had been possible, if there had been time and peace to ape it in peace not between men of the same race and nation but peace between two young embattled spirits and the incontrovertible fact which embattled them, since neither Henry and Bon, anymore than Quentin and Shreve, were the first young men to believe (or at least apparently act on the assumption) that wars were sometimes created for the sole aim of settling youth's private difficulties and discontents.

'So the old dame asked Henry that one question and then sat there laughing at him, so he knew then, they both knew then. And so now it would be short, this time with the lawyer, the shortest one of all.

Because the lawyer would have been watching him; maybe there had even been a letter during that second fall while the lawyer was waiting and still nothing seemed to be happening up there (and maybe the lawyer was the reason why Bon never answered Henry's and Judith's letters during that summer: because he never got them) ‐ a letter, two or maybe three pages of your humble and obedient e and t and c that boiled down to eighteen words I know you are a fool, but just what kind of a fool are you going to be? and Bon was at least enough of a not‐fool to do the boiling down. ‐ Yes, watching him, not concerned yet, just considerably annoyed, giving Bon plenty of time to come to him, giving him all of a week maybe (after he ‐ the lawyer ‐ would have contrived to get hold of Henry and find out a good deal of what Henry was thinking without Henry ever knowing it) before he would contrive Bon too, and maybe so good at the contriving that even Bon would not know at once what was coming. It would be a short one. It would be no secret between them now; it would just be unsaid: the lawyer behind the desk (and maybe in the secret drawer the ledger where he had just finished adding in the last past year's interest compounded between the intrinsic and the love and pride at two hundred percent) ‐ the lawyer fretted, annoyed, but not at all concerned since he not only knew he had the screws, but he still did not really believe that Bon was that kind of a fool, though he was about to alter his opinion somewhat about the dullness, or at least the backwardness the lawyer watching him and saying, smooth and oily, since it would be no secret now, who would know now that Bon knew all he would ever know or would need to know to make the coup: "Do you know that you are a very fortunate young man?

With most of us, even when we are lucky enough to get our revenge, we must pay for it, sometimes in actual dollars. While you are not only in a position to get your revenge, clear your mother's name, but the balm with which you will assuage her injury will have a collateral value which can be translated into the things which a young man needs, which are his due and which, whether we like it or not, may he had only in exchange for hard dollars ‐" and Bon not saying What do you mean? and not moving yet; that is, the lawyer would not be aware that he was beginning to move, continuing (the lawyer) smooth and easy: "And more than this, than the revenge, as lagniappe to the revenge as it were, this nosegay of an afternoon, this scentless prairie flower which will not be missed and which might as well bloom in your lapel as in another's; this ‐ How do you young men put it? ‐ a nice little piece ‐" and then he would see Bon, maybe the eyes, maybe he would just hear the feet moving. And then, pistol (derringer, horse pistol, revolver, whatever it was) and all, he would be crouched back against the wall behind the overturned chair, snarling, "Stand back! Stop!" then screaming "Help! Help! He ‐!" then just screaming, because he would hear and feel his own wrenching bones before he could free his fingers of the pistol, and his neck bone too as Bon would strike him with the palm on one cheek and then with the back of the hand on the other; maybe he could even hear Bon too saying, "Stop it. Hush. I'm not going to hurt you" or maybe it was the lawyer in him that said the Hush which he obeyed, who got him back into the righted chair again, half lying upon the desk; the lawyer in him that warned him not to say You will pay for this but instead to half lie there, nursing his wrenched hand in his handkerchief while Bon stood looking down at him, holding the pistol by the barrel against his leg, saying, "If you feel that you require satisfaction, of course you know ‐" and the lawyer, sitting back now, dabbing the handkerchief at his cheek now: "I was wrong. I misunderstood your feeling about the matter. I ask your pardon" and Bon: "Granted. As you wish. I will accept either an apology or a bullet, as you prefer" and the lawyer (there would be a faint fading red in his cheek, but that would be all: nothing in the voice or in the eyes): "I see you are going to collect full measure for my unfortunate misconception ‐ even ridicule. Even if I felt that right was on my side (which I do not) I would still have to decline your offer. I would not be your equal with pistols" and Bon: "Nor with knives or rapiers too?" and the lawyer, smooth and easy: "Nor knives or rapiers too." So that now the lawyer wouldn't even need to say You will pay for this because Bon would be saying that for him, who would stand there with the lax pistol, thinking But only with knives or pistols or rapiers. So I cant beat him. I could shoot him. I would shoot him with no more compunction than I would a snake or a man who cuckolded me. But he would still beat me.

Thinking Yes. He did beat me while he ‐ he (Listen,' Shreve said, cried.

'It would be while he would be lying in a bedroom of that private house in Corinth after Pittsburg Landing while his shoulder got well two years later and the letter from the octoroon (maybe even the one that contained the photograph of her and the child) finally overtaking him, wailing for money and telling him that the lawyer had departed for Texas or Mexico or somewhere at last and that she (the octoroon) could not find his mother either and so without doubt the lawyer had murdered her before he stole the money, since it would be just like both of them to flee or get themselves killed without providing for her at all.) ‐ Yes, they knew now. And Jesus, think of him, Bon, who had wanted to know, who had had the most reason to want to know, who as far as he knew had never had any father but had been created somehow between that woman who wouldn't let him play with other children, and that lawyer who even told the woman whether or not each time she bought a piece of meat or a loaf of bread ‐ two people neither of whom had taken pleasure or found passion in getting him or suffered pain and travail in horning him ‐ who perhaps if one of the two had only told him the truth, none of what happened would ever have come to pass; while there was Henry who had father and security and contentment and all, yet was told the truth by both of them while he (Bon) was told by neither. And think of Henry, who had said at first it was a lie and then when he knew it was not a lie had still said "I don't believe it," who had found even in that "I don't believe it" enough of strength to repudiate home and blood in order to champion his defiance, and in which championing he proved his contention to be the false one and was more than ever interdict against returning home; Jesus, think of the load he had to carry, born of two Methodists (or of one long invincible line of Methodists) and raised in provincial North Mississippi, faced with incest, incest of all things that might have been reserved for him, that all his heredity and training had to rebel against on principle, and in a situation where he knew that neither incest nor training was going to help him solve it. So that maybe when they left and walked the streets that night and at last Bon said, "Well? Now what?" Henry said, "Wait. Wait. Let me get used to it."

And maybe it was two days or three days, and Henry said, "You shall not. Shall not" and then it was Bon that said, "Wait. I am your older brother: do you say shall not to me?" And maybe it was a week, maybe Bon took Henry to see the octoroon and Henry looked at her and said, "Aint that enough for you?" and Bon said, "Do you want it to be enough?" and Henry said, "Wait. Wait. I must have time to get used to it.

You will have to give me time." Jesus, think how Henry must have talked during that winter and then that spring with Lincoln elected and the Alabama convention and the South began to draw out of the Union, and then there were two presidents in the United States and the telegraph brought the news about Charleston and Lincoln called out his army and it was done, irrevocable now, and Henry and Bon already decided to go without having to consult one another, who would have gone anyway even if they had never seen one another but certainly now, because after all you don't waste a war ‐ think how they must have talked, how Henry would say, "But must you marry her? Do you have to do it?" and Bon would say, "He should have told me. He should have told me, myself, himself. I was fair and honorable with him. I waited. You know now why I waited. I gave him every chance to tell me himself. But he didn't do it. If he had, I would have agreed and promised never to see her or you or him again.

But he didn't tell me. I thought at first it was because he didn't know. Then I knew that he did know, and still I waited. But he didn't tell me. He just told you, sent me a message like you send a command by a nigger servant to a beggar or a tramp to clear out. Dont you see that?" and Henry would say, "But Judith. Our sister. Think of her" and Bon: "All right. Think of her.

Then what?" because they both knew what Judith would do when she found it out because they both knew that women will show pride and honor about almost anything except love, and Henry said, "Yes. I see. I understand. But you will have to give me time to get used to it. You are my older brother; you can do that little for me." Think of the two of them: Bon who didn't know what he was going to do and had to say, pretend, he did; and Henry who knew what he was going to do and had to say he didn't. Then it was Christmas again, then 1861, and they hadn't heard from Judith because Judith didn't know for sure where they were because Henry wouldn't let Bon write to her yet; then they heard about the company, the University Grays, organizing up at Oxford and maybe they had been waiting for that. So they took the steamboat North again, and more gaiety and excitement on the boat now than Christmas even, like it always is when a war starts, before the scene gets cluttered up with bad food and wounded soldiers and widows and orphans, and them taking no part in it now either but standing at the rail again above the churning water, and maybe it would be two or three days, then Henry said suddenly, cried suddenly: "But kings have done it! Even dukes! There was that Lorraine duke named John something that married his sister. The Pope excommunicated him but it didn't hurt! It didn't hurt! They were still husband and wife. They were still alive. They still loved!" then again, loud, fast: "But you will have to wait! You will have to give me time! Maybe the war will settle it and we wont need to!" And maybe this was one place where your old man was right: and they rode into Oxford without touching Sutpen's Hundred and signed the company roster and then hid somewhere to wait, and Henry let Bon write Judith one letter; they would send it by hand, by a nigger that would steal into the quarters by night and give it to Judith's maid, and Judith sent the picture in the metal case and they rode on ahead to wait until the company got through making flags and riding about the state telling girls farewell and started for the front.

'Jesus, think of them. Because Bon would know what Henry was doing, just as he had always known what Henry was thinking since that first day when they had looked at one another. Maybe he would know all the better what Henry was doing because he did not know what he himself was going to do, that he would not know until all of a sudden some day it would burst clear and he would know then that he had known all the time what it would be, so he didn't have to bother about himself and so all he had to do was just to watch Henry trying to reconcile what he (Henry) knew he was going to do with all the voices of his heredity and training which said No. No. You cannot, You must not. You shall not.

Maybe they would even be under fire now, with the shells rushing and rumbling past overhead and bursting and them lying there waiting to charge and Henry would cry again, "But that Lorraine duke did it!

There must have been lots in the world who have done it that people don't know about, that maybe they suffered for it and died for it and are in hell now for it. But they did it and it don't matter now; even the ones we do know about are just names now and it don't matter now" and Bon watching him and listening to him and thinking It's because I don't know myself what I am going to do and so he is aware that I am undecided without knowing that he is aware. Perhaps if I told him now that I am going to do it, he would know his own mind and tell me, You shall not. And maybe your old man was right that time and they did think maybe the war would settle it and they would not have to themselves, or at least maybe Henry hoped it would because maybe your old man was right here too and Bon didn't care that since both of the two people Who could have given him a father had declined to do it, nothing mattered to him now, revenge or love or all, since he knew now that revenge could not compensate him nor love assuage. Maybe it wasn't even Henry who wouldn't let him write to Judith but Bon himself who did not write her because he didn't care about anything, not even that he didn't know yet what he was going to do. Then it was the next year and Bon was an officer now and they were moving toward Shilo without knowing that either, talking again as they moved along in column, the officer dropping back alongside the file in which the private marched and Henry crying again, holding his desperate and urgent voice down to undertone: "Dont you know yet what you are going to do?" while Bon would look at him for a moment with that expression which could have been smiling: "Suppose I told you I did not intend to go back to her?" and Henry would walk there beside him, with his pack and his eight feet of musket, and he would begin to pant, panting and panting while Bon watched him: "I am out in front of you a lot now; going into battle, charging, I will be out in front of you‐" and Henry panting, "Stop! Stop!" and Bon watching him with that faint thin expression about the mouth and eyes: "‐ and who would ever know? You would not even have to know for certain yourself, because who could say but what a Yankee ball might have struck me at the exact second you pulled your trigger, or even before ‐" and Henry panting and looking, glaring at the sky, with his teeth showing and the sweat on his face and the knuckles of the hand on his musket butt white, saying, panting, "Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!" Then it was Shilo, the second day and the lost battle and the brigade falling back from Pittsburgh Landing And listen,'

Shreve cried; 'wait, now; wait! ' (glaring at Quentin, panting himself, as if he had had to supply his shade not only with a cue but with breath to obey it in): ' Because your old man was wrong here, too!

He said it was Bon who was wounded, but it wasn't. Because who told him? Who told Sutpen, or your grandfather either, which of them it was who was hit? Sutpen didn't know because he wasn't there, and your grandfather wasn't there either because that was where he was hit too, where he lost his arm. So who told them? Not Henry, because his father never saw Henry but that one time and maybe they never had time to talk about wounds and besides to talk about wounds in the Confederate army in 1865 would be like coal miners talking about soot; and not Bon, because Sutpen never saw him at all because he was dead ‐ it was not Bon, it was Henry; Bon that found Henry at last and stooped to pick him up and Henry fought back, struggled, saying, "Let be! Let me die! I wont have to know it then" and Bon said, "So you do want me to go back to her" and Henry lay there struggling and panting, with the sweat on his face and his teeth bloody inside his chewed lip, and Bon said, "Say you do want me to go back to her. Maybe then I wont do it. Say it" and Henry lay there struggling, with the fresh red staining through his shirt and his teeth showing and the sweat on his face until Bon held his arms and lifted him onto his back ‐'

First, two of them, then four; now two again. The room was indeed tomblike: a quality stale and static and moribund beyond any mere vivid and living cold. Yet they remained in it, though not thirty feet away was bed and warmth.

Quentin had not even put on his overcoat, which lay on the floor where it had fallen from the arm of the chair where Shreve had put it down. They did not retreat from the cold. They both bore it as though in deliberate flagellant exaltation of physical misery transmogrified into the spirits' travail of the two young men during that time fifty years ago, or forty‐eight rather, then forty‐seven and then forty‐six, since it was '64 and then '65 and the starved and ragged remnant of an army having retreated across Alabama and Georgia and into Carolina, swept onward not by a victorious army behind it but rather by a mounting tide of the names of lost battles from either side Chickamauga and Franklin, Vicksburg and Corinth and Atlanta ‐ battles lost not alone because of superior numbers and failing ammunition and stores, but because of generals who should not have been generals, who were generals not through training in contemporary methods or aptitude for learning them, but by the divine right to say "Go there" conferred upon them by an absolute caste system; or because the generals of it never lived long enough to learn how to fight massed cautious accretionary battles, since they were already as obsolete as Richard or Roland or du Guesclin, who wore plumes and cloaks lined with scarlet at twenty‐eight and thirty and thirty‐two and captured warships with cavalry charges but not grain nor meat nor bullets, who would whip three separate armies in as many days and then tear down their own fences to cook meat robbed from their own smokehouses, who on one night and with a handful of men would gallantly set fire to and destroy a million dollar garrison of enemy supplies and on the next night be discovered by a neighbor in bed with his wife and be shot to death ‐ two, four, now two again, according to Quentin and Shreve, the two the four the two still talking ‐ the one who did not yet know what he was going to do, the other who knew what he would have to do yet could not reconcile himself‐Henry citing himself authority for incest, talking about his Duke John of Lorraine as if he hoped possibly to evoke that condemned and excommunicated shade to tell him in person that it was all right, as people both before and since have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon ‐ the two the four the two facing one another in the tomblike room: Shreve, the Canadian, the child of blizzards and of cold in a bathrobe with an overcoat above it, the collar turned up about his ears; Quentin, the Southerner, the morose and delicate offspring of rain and steamy heat in the thin suitable clothing which he had brought from Mississippi, his overcoat (as thin and vain for what it was as the suit) lying on the floor where he had not even bothered to raise it: (‐ the winter of '64 now, the army retreated across Alabama, into Georgia; now Carolina was just at their backs and Bon, the officer, thinking 'We will either be caught and annihilated or Old Joe will extricate us and we will make contact with Lee in front of Richmond and then we will at least have the privilege of surrender': and then one day all of a sudden he thought of it, remembered, how that Jefferson regiment of which his father was now colonel was in Longstreet's corps, and maybe from that moment the whole purpose of the retreat seemed to him to be that of bringing him within reach of his father, to give his father one more chance.

So that it must have seemed to him now that he knew at last why he had not been able to decide what he wanted to do. Maybe he thought for just a second, ' My God, I am still young; even after these four years I am still young' but just for a second, because maybe in the same breath he said, 'All right. Then I am young. But I still believe, even though what I believe probably is that war, suffering, these four years of keeping his men alive and able in order to swap them blood and flesh for the largest amount of ground at its bargain price, will have changed him (which I know that it does not do) to where he will say to me not: Forgive me: but: You are my oldest son. Protect your sister; never see either of us again:' Then it was '65 and what was left of the army of the West with nothing remaining now but the ability to walk backward slow and stubborn and to endure musketry and shelling; maybe they didn't even miss the shoes and overcoats and food any more now and that was why he could write about the captured stove polish like he did in the letter to Judith when he finally knew what he was going to do at last and told Henry and Henry said ' Thank God. Thank God,'

not for the incest of course but because at last they were going to do something, at last he could be something even though that something was the irrevocable repudiation of the old heredity and training and the acceptance of eternal damnation. Maybe he could even quit talking about his Lorraine duke then, because he could say now, 'It isn't yours nor his nor the Pope's hell that we are all going to: it's my mother's and her mother's and father's and their mother's and father's hell, and it isn't you who are going there, but we, the three ‐ no: four of us. And so at least we will all be together where we belong, since even if only he went there we would still have to be there too since the three of us are just illusions that he begot, and your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory And we will all be together in torment and so we will not need to remember love and fornication, and maybe in torment you cannot even remember why you are there. And if we cannot remember all this, it cant be much torment." Then they were in Carolina, that January and February of '65 and what was left of them had been walking backward for almost a year now and the distance between them and Richmond was less far than the distance they had come; the distance between them and the end a good deal less far. But to Bon it was not the space between them and defeat but the space between him and the other regiment, between him and the hour, the moment: He will not even have to ask me; I will just touch flesh with him and I will say it myself: You will not need to worry; she shall never see me again." Then March in Carolina and still the walking backward slow and stubborn and listening to the Northward now because there was nothing to hear from any other direction because in all the other directions it was finished now, and all they expected to hear from the North was defeat. Then one day (he was an officer; he would have known, heard, that Lee had detached some troops and sent them down to reinforce them; perhaps he even knew the names and numbers of the regiments before they arrived) he saw Sutpen. Maybe that first time Sutpen actually did not see him, maybe that first time he could tell himself, 'That was why; he didn't see me,'

so that he had to put himself in Sutpen's way, make his chance and situation.

Then for the second time he looked at the expressionless and rocklike face, at the pale boring eyes in which there was no flicker, nothing, the face in which he saw his own features, in which he saw recognition, and that was all. That was all, there was nothing further now; perhaps he just breathed once quietly, with on his own face that expression which might at a glance have been called smiling while he thought, 'I could force him. I could go to him and force him,' knowing that he would not because it was all finished now, that was all of it now and at last. And maybe it was that same night or maybe a night a week later while they were stopped (because even Sherman would have to stop sometimes at night) with the fires burning for warmth at least because at least warmth is cheap and doesn't remain consumed, that Bon said, ' Henry' and said, 'It wont be much longer now and then there wont be anything left: we wont even have anything to do left, not even the privilege of walking backward slowly for a reason, for the sake of honor and what's left of pride. Not God; evidently we have done without Him for four years, only He just didn't think to notify us; and not only not shoes and clothing but not even any need for them, and not only no land nor any way to make food, but no need for the food since we have learned to live without that too; and so if you don't have God and you don't need food and clothes and shelter, there isn't anything for honor and pride to climb on and hold to and flourish. And if you haven't got honor and pride, then nothing matters. Only there is something in you that doesn't care about honor and pride yet that lives, that even walks backward for a whole year just to live; that probably even when this is over and there is not even defeat left, will still decline to sit still in the sun and die, but will be out in the woods, moving and seeking where just will and endurance could not move it, grubbing for roots and such ‐

the old mindless sentient undreaming meat that doesn't even know any difference between despair and victory, Henry." And then Henry would begin to say 'Thank God. Thank God' panting and saying

'Thank God,' saying, 'Dont try to explain it. Just do it' and Bon: 'You authorize me? As her brother you give me permission?" and Henry: 'Brother? Brother?

You are the oldest: why do you ask me?" and Bon: 'No. He has never acknowledged me. He just warned me. You are the brother and the son. Do I have your permission, Henry?" and Henry:

'Write. Write. Write." So Bon wrote the letter, after the four years, and Henry read it and sent it off.

But they didn't quit then and follow the letter. They still walked backward, slow and stubborn, listening toward the North for the end of it because it takes an awful lot of character to quit anything when you are losing, and they had been walking backward slow for a year now So all they had left was not the will but just the ability, the grooved habit to endure. Then one night they had stopped again since Sherman had stopped again, and an orderly came along the bivouac line and found Henry at last and said, ' Sutpen, the colonel wants you in his tent.")

'And so you and the old dame, the Aunt Rosa, went out there that night and the old nigger Clytie tried to stop you, stop her; she held your arm and said, "Dont let her go up there, young marster" but you couldn't stop her either because she was strong with forty‐five years of hate like forty‐five years of raw meat and all Clytie had was just forty‐five or fifty years of despair and waiting; and you, you didn't even want to be there at all to begin with. And you couldn't stop her either and then you saw that Clytie's trouble wasn't anger nor even distrust; it was terror, fear. And she didn't tell you in so many words because she was still keeping that secret for the sake of the man who had been her father too as well as for the sake of the family which no longer existed, whose heretofore inviolate and rotten mausoleum she still guarded ‐ didn't tell you in so many words anymore than she told you in so many words how she had been in the room that day when they brought Bon's body in and Judith took from his pocket the metal case she had given him with her picture in it; she didn't tell you, it just came out of the terror and the fear after she turned you loose and caught the Aunt Rosa's arm and the Aunt Rosa turned and struck her hand away and went on to the stairs and Clytie ran at her again and this time the Aunt Rosa stopped and turned on the second step and knocked Clytie down with her fist like a man would and turned and went on up the stairs: and Clytie lay there on the floor, more than eighty years old and not much more than five feet tall and looking like a little bundle of clean rags so that you went and took her arm and helped her up and her arm felt like a stick, as light and dry and brittle as a stick: and she looked at you and you saw it was not rage but terror, and not nigger terror because it was not about herself but was about whatever it was that was upstairs, that she had kept hidden up there for almost four years; and she didn't tell you in the actual words because even in the terror she kept the secret; nevertheless she told you, or at least all of a sudden you knew ‐'

Shreve ceased again. It was just as well, since he had no listener. Perhaps he was aware of it.

Then suddenly he had no talker either, though possibly he was not aware of this. Because now neither of them were there. They were both in Carolina and the time was forty‐six years ago, and it was not even four now but compounded still further, since now both of them were Henry Sutpen and both of them were Bon, compounded each of both yet either neither, smelling the very smoke which had blown and faded away forty‐six years ago from the bivouac fires burning in a pine grove, the gaunt and ragged men sitting or lying about them, talking not about the war yet all curiously enough (or perhaps not curiously at all) facing the South where further on in the darkness the pickets stood‐ the pickets who, watching to the South, could see the flicker and gleam of the Federal bivouac fires myriad and faint and encircling half the horizon and counting ten fires for each Confederate one, and between whom and which (Rebel picket and Yankee fire) the Yankee outposts watched the darkness also, the two picket lines so close that each could hear the challenge of the other's officers passing from post to post and dying away: and when gone, the voice, invisible cautious, not loud yet carrying: * Hey, Reb.

* Yah.

* where you fellers going?

* Richmond.

* So are we. why not wait for us?

* We air.

The men about the fires would not hear this exchange, though they would presently hear the orderly plainly enough as he passes from fire to fire, asking for Sutpen and being directed on and so reaches the fire at last, the smoldering log, with his monotonous speech: 'Sutpen?

I'm looking for Sutpen' until Henry sits up and says, 'Here." He is gaunt and ragged and unshaven; because of the last four years and because he had not quite got his height when the four years began, he is not as tall by two inches as he gave promise of being, and not as heavy by thirty pounds as he probably will be a few years after he has outlived the four years, if he do outlive them.

* Here, he says ‐ What is it?

* The colonel wants you.

The orderly does not return with him. Instead, he walks alone through the darkness along a rutted road, a road rutted and cut and churned where the guns have passed over it that afternoon, and reaches the tent at last, one of the few tents, the canvas wall gleaming faintly from a candle within, the silhouette of a sentry before it, who challenges him.

* Sutpen, Henry says‐ The colonel sent for me.

The sentry gestures him into the tent. He stoops through the entrance, the canvas falls behind him as someone, the only occupant of the tent, rises from a camp chair behind the table on which the candle sits, his shadow swooping high and huge up the canvas wall. He (Henry) comes to salute facing a graff sleeve with colonel's braid on it, one beard cheek, a jutting nose, a shaggy droop of iron‐riddle hair‐ a face which Henry does not recognize, not because he has not seen it in four years and does not expect to see it here and now, but rather because he is not looking at it. He just salutes the braided cuff and stands so until the other says, * Henry.

Even now Henry does not start. He just stands so, the two of them stand so, looking at one another. It is the older man who moves first, though they meet in the center of the tent, where they embrace and kiss before Henry is aware that he has moved, was going to move, moved by what of close blood which in the reflex instant abrogates and reconciles even though it does not yet (perhaps never will) forgive, who stands now while his father holds his face between both hands, looking at it.

* Henry, Sutpen says‐ My son.

Then they sit, one on either side of the table, in the chairs reserved for officers, the table (an open map lies on it) and the candle between them.

* You were hit at Shilo, Colonel Willow tells me, Sutpen says.

* Yes, sir, Henry says.

He is about to say Charles carried me back but he does not, because already he knows what is coming. He does not even think Surely Judith didn't write him about that letter or It was Clytie who sent him word somehow that Charles has written her. He thinks neither of these. To him it is logical and natural that their father should know of his and Bon's decision: that rapport of blood which should bring Bon to decide to write, himself to agree to it and their father to know of it at the same identical instant, after a period of four years, out of all time. Now it does come, almost exactly as he had known that it will: * I have seen Charles Bon, Henry.

Henry says nothing. It is coming now. He says nothing, he merely stares at his father‐ the two of them in leaf‐faded graff, a single candle, a crude tent walling them away from a darkness where alert pickets face one another and where weary men sleep without shelter, waiting for dawn and the firing, the weary backward walking to commence again: yet in a second tent candle gray and all are gone and it is the hollydecked Christmas library at Sutpen's Hundred four years ago and the table not a camp table suitable for the spreading of maps but the heavy carved rosewood one at home with the group photograph of his mother and sister and himself sitting upon it, his father behind the table and behind his father the window above the garden where Judith and Bon strolled in that slow rhythm where the heart matches the footsteps and the eyes need only look at one another.

* You are going to let him marry Judith, Henry.

Still Henry does not answer. It has all been said before, and now he has had four years of bitter struggle following which, whether it be victory or defeat which he has gained, at least he has gained it and has peace now, even if the peace be mostly despair.

* He cannot marry her, Henry.

Now Henry speaks.

* You said that before. I told you then. And now, and now it wont be much longer now and then we wont have anything left: honor nor pride not God since God quit us four years ago only He never thought it necessary to tell us; no shoes nor clothes and no need for them; not only no land to make food out of but no need for the food and when you don't have God and honor and pride, nothing matters except that there is the old mindless meat that don't even care if it was defeat or victory, that wont even die, that will be out in the woods and fields, grubbing up mots and weeds. ‐

Yes. I have decided, Brother or not, I have decided. I will. I will.

* He must not marry her, Henry.

* Yes. I said Yes at first, but I was not decided then. I didn't let him.

But now I have had four years to decide in. I will. I am going to.

* He must not marry her, Henry. His mother's father told me that her mother had been a Spanish woman. I believed him; it was not until after he was born that I found out that his mother was part Negro.

Nor did Henry ever say that he did not remember leaving the tent.

He remembers all of it. He remembers stooping through the entrance again and passing the sentry again; he remembers walking back down the cut and rutted road, stumbling in the dark among the ruts on either side of which the fires have now died to embers, so that he can barely distinguish the men sleeping on the earth about them. It must be better than eleven oclock, he thinks. And another eight miles tomorrow. If it were only not for those damned guns. Why doesn't Old Joe give the guns to Sherman. Then we could make twenty miles a day.

We could join Lee then. At least Lee stops and fights some of the time. He remembers it. He remembers how he did not return to his fire but stopped presently in a lonely place and leaned against a pine, leaning quietly and easily, with his head back so he could look up at the shabby shaggy branches like something in wrought iron spreading motionless against the chill vivid stars of early spring, thinking I hope he remembers to thank Colonel Willow for letting us use his tent, thinking not what he would do but what he would have to do.

Because he knew what he would do; it now depended on what Bon would do, would force him to do, since he knew that he would do it. So I must go to him, he thought, thinking, Now it is better than two o'clock and it will be dawn soon.

Then it was dawn, or almost, and it was cold: a chill which struck through the worn patched thin clothing, through the something of weariness and undernourishment; the passive ability, not the volitional will, to endure; there was light somewhere, enough of it for him to distinguish Bon's sleeping face from among the others where he lay wrapped in his blankets, beneath his spread cloak; enough light for him to wake Bon by and for Bon to distinguish his face (or perhaps something communicated by Henry's hand) because Bon does not speak, demand to know who it is: he merely rises and puts the cloak about his shoulders and approaches the smoldering fire and is kicking it into a blaze when Henry speaks: * Wait.

Bon pauses and looks at Henry; now he can see Henry's face. He says, * You will be cold. You are cold now. You haven't been asleep, have you? Here.

He swings the cloak from his shoulders and holds it out.

* No, Henry says.

* Yes. Take it. I'll get my blanket.

Bon puts the cloak about Henry and goes and takes up his tumbled blanket and swings it about his shoulders, and they move aside and sit on a log. Now it is dawn. The east is gray; it will be primrose soon and then red with firing and once more the weary backward marching will begin, retreating from annihilation, falling back upon defeat, though not quite yet. There will be a little time yet for them to sit side by side upon the log in the making light of dawn, the one in the cloak, the other in the blanket; their voices are not much louder than the silent dawn itself: * So it's the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear.

Henry doesn't answer.

* And he sent me no word? He did not ask you to send me to him?

No word to me, no word at all? That was all he had to do, now, today; four years ago or at any time during the four years. That was all. He would not have needed to ask it, require it, of me. I would have offered it. I would have said, I will never see her again before he could have asked it of me. He did not have to do this, Henry. He didn't need to tell you I am a nigger to stop me. He could have stopped me without that, Henry.

* No! Henry cries. ‐ No! No! I will ‐ I'll He springs up; his face is working; Bon can see his teeth within the soft beard which covers his sunken cheeks, and the whites of Henry's eyes as though the eyeballs struggled in their sockets as the panting breath struggled in his lungs ‐ the panting which ceased, the breath held, the eyes too looking down at him where he sat on the log, the voice now not much louder than an expelled breath: * You said, could have stopped you.

What do you mean by that?

Now it is Bon who does not answer, who sits on the log looking at the face stooped above him.

Henry says, still in that voice no louder than breathing: * But now? You mean you ‐ * Yes.

What else can I do now? I gave him the choice. I have been giving him the choice for four years.

Think of her. Not of me: of her.

* I have. For four years. Of you and her. Now I am thinking of myself.

* No, Henry says. ‐ No. No.

* I cannot?

* You shall not.

* Who will stop me, Henry?

* No, Henry says. ‐ No. No. No.

Now it is Bon who watches Henry; he can see the whites of Henry's eyes again as he sits looking at Henry with that expression which might be called smiling. His hand vanishes beneath the blanket and reappears, holding his pistol by the barrel, the butt extended toward Henry.

* Then do it now, he says.

Henry looks at the pistol; now he is not only panting, he is trembling; when he speaks now his voice is not even the exhalation, it is the suffused and suffocating inbreath itself: * You are my brother.

* No I'm not. I'm the nigger that's going to sleep with your sister. Unless you stop me, Henry.

Suddenly Henry grasps the pistol, jerks it free of Bon's hand stands so, the pistol in his hand, panting and panting; again Bon can see the whites of his inrolled eyes while he sits on the log and watches Henry with that faint expression about the eyes and mouth which might be smiling.

* Do it now, Henry, he says.

Henry whirls; in the same motion he hurls the pistol from him and stoops again, gripping Bon by both shoulders, panting.

* You shall not! he says. ‐ You shall not! Do you hear me?

Bon does not move beneath the gripping hands; he sits motionless, with his faint fixed grimace; his voice is gentler than that first breath in which the pine branches begin to move a little: *

You will have to stop me, Henry. ' And he never slipped away,' Shreve said. 'He could have, but he never even tried. Jesus, maybe he even went to Henry and said, "I'm going, Henry" and maybe they left together and rode side by side dodging Yankee patrols all the way back to Mississippi and right up to that gate; side by side and it only then that one of them ever rode ahead or dropped behind and that only then Henry spurred ahead and turned his horse to face Bon and took out the pistol; and Judith and Clytie heard the shot, and maybe Wash Jones was hanging around somewhere in the back yard and so he was there to help Clytie and Judith carry him into the house and lay him on the bed, and Wash went to town to tell the Aunt Rosa and the Aunt Rosa comes boiling out that afternoon and finds Judith standing without a tear before the closed door, holding the metal case she had given him with her picture in it but that didn't have her picture in it now but that of the octoroon and the kid. And your old man wouldn't know about that too: why the black son of a bitch should have taken her picture out and put the octoroon's picture in, so he invented a reason for it. But I know. And you know too. Don't you? Don't you, huh?" He glared at Quentin, leaning forward over the table now, looking huge and shapeless as a bear in his swaddling of garments. 'Dont you know? It was because he said to himself, "If Henry don't mean what he said, it will be all right; I can take it out and destroy it. But if he does mean what he said, it will be the only way I will have to say to her, I was no good; do not grieve for me." Aint that right?

Aint it? By God, aint it?"

'Yes,' Quentin said.

'Come on,' Shreve said. 'Let's get out of this refrigerator and go to bed."

NINE

At first, in bed in the dark, it seemed colder than ever, as if there had been some puny quality of faint heat in the single light bulb before Shreve turned it off and that now the iron and impregnable dark had become one with the iron and icelike bedclothing lying upon the flesh slacked and thin‐clad for sleeping. Then the darkness seemed to breathe, to flow back; the window which Shreve had opened became visible against the faintly unearthly glow of the outer snow as, forced by the weight of the darkness, the blood surged and ran warmer, warmer. ' University of Mississippi,' Shreve's voice said in the darkness to Quentin's right. 'Bayard attenuated forty miles (it was forty miles, wasn't it?); out of the wilderness proud honor semesterial regurgitant."

'Yes,' Quentin said. 'They were in the tenth graduating class since it was founded."

'I didn't know there were ten in Mississippi that went to school at one time,' Shreve said.

Quentin didn't answer. He lay watching the rectangle of window, feeling the warming blood driving through his veins, his arms and legs. And now, although he was warm and though while he had sat in the cold room he merely shook faintly and steadily, now he began to jerk all over, violently and uncontrollably until he could even hear the bed, until even Shreve felt it and turned, raising himself (by the sound) onto his elbow to look at Quentin, though Quentin himself felt perfectly all right. He felt fine even, lying there and waiting in peaceful curiosity for the next violent unharbingered jerk to come.

'Jesus, are you that cold?" Shreve said. 'Do you want me to spread the overcoats on you?"

'No,' Quentin said. 'I'm not cold. I'm all right. I feel fine."

'Then what are you doing that for?"

'I don't know. I cant help it. I feel fine."

'All right. But let me know if you want the coats. Jesus, if I was going to have to spend nine months in this climate, I would sure hate to have come from the South. Maybe I wouldn't come from the South anyway, even if I could stay there.

Wait. Listen. I'm not trying to be funny, smart. I just want to understand it if I can and I don't know how to say it better. Because it's something my people haven't got. Or if we have got it, it all happened long ago across the water and so now here aint anything to look at every day to remind us of it. We don't live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves (or have I got it backward and was it your folks that are free and the niggers that lost?) and bullets in the dining‐room table and such, to be always reminding us to never forget. What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as your childrens' children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett's charge at Manassas?"

'Gettysburg,' Quentin said. 'You cant understand it. You would have to be born there."

'Would I then?" Quentin did not answer.

'Do you understand it?"

'I don't know,' Quentin said. 'Yes, of course I understand it." They breathed in the darkness.

After a moment Quentin said: 'I don't know."

'Yes. You don't know. You don't even know about the old dame, the Aunt Rosa."

'Miss Rosa,' Quentin said.

'All right. You don't even know about her. Except that she refused at the last to be a ghost.

That after almost fifty years she couldn't reconcile herself to letting him lie dead in peace.

That even after fifty years she not only could get up and go out there to finish up what she found she hadn't quite completed, but she could find someone to go with her and bust into that locked house because instinct or something told her it was not finished yet. Do you?"

'No,' Quentin said peacefully. He could taste the dust. Even now, with the chill pure weight of the snow‐breathed New England air on his face, he could taste and feel the dust of that breathless (rather, furnace‐breathed) Mississippi September night. He could even smell the old woman in the buggy beside him, smell the fusty camphor‐reeking shawl and even the airless black cotton umbrella in which (he would not discover until they had reached the house) she had concealed a hatchet and a flashlight. He could smell the horse; he could hear the dry plaint of the light wheels in the weightless permeant dust and he seemed to feel the dust itself move sluggish and dry across his sweating flesh just as he seemed to hear the single profound suspiration of the parched earth's agony rising toward the imponderable and aloof stars. Now she spoke, for the first time since they had left Jefferson, since she had climbed into the buggy with a kind of clumsy and fumbling and trembling eagerness (which he thought derived from terror, alarm, until he found that he was quite wrong) before he could help her, to sit on the extreme edge of the seat, small, in the fusty shawl and clutching the umbrella, leaning forward as if by leaning forward she would arrive the sooner, arrive immediately after the horse and before he, Quentin, would, before the prescience of her desire and need could warn its consummation. 'Now,' she said. 'We are on the Domain. On his land, his and Ellen's and Ellen's descendants. They have taken it away from them since, I understand. But it still belongs to him, to Ellen and her descendants." But Quentin was already aware of that. Before she spoke he had said to himself, "Now. Now" and (as during the long hot afternoon in the dim hot little house) it seemed to him that if he stopped the buggy and listened, he might even hear the galloping hoofs; might even see at any moment now the black stallion and the rider rush across the road before them and gallop on ‐ the rider who at one time owned, lock stock and barrel, everything he could see from a given point, with every stick and blade and hoof and heel on it to remind him (if he ever forgot it) that he was the biggest thing in their sight and in his own too; who went to war to protect it and lost the war and returned home to find that he had lost more than the war even, though not absolutely all; who said At least I have life left but did not have life but only old age and breathing and horror and scorn and fear and indignation: and all remaining to look at him with unchanged regard was the girl who had been a child when he saw her last, who doubtless used to watch him from window or door as he passed unaware of her as she would have looked at God probably, since everything else within her view belonged to him too. Maybe he would even stop at the cabin and ask for water and she would take the bucket and walk the mile and back to the spring to fetch it fresh and cool for him, no more thinking of saying 'The bucket is empty' to him than she would have said it to God ‐ this the not‐all, since at least there was breathing left.

Now Quentin began to breathe hard again, who had been peaceful for a time in the warm bed, breathing hard the heavy pure snowborn darkness.

She (Miss Coldfield) did not let him enter the gate. She said 'Stop' suddenly; he felt her hand flutter on his arm and he thought, "Why, she is afraid." He could hear her panting now, her voice almost a wall of diffident yet iron determination: 'I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do."

("I do," he thought. "Go back to town and go to bed.") But he did not say it. He looked at the two huge rotting gate posts in the starlight, between which no gates swung now, wondering from what direction Bon and Henry had ridden up that day, wondering what had cast the shadow which Bon was not to pass alive; if some living tree which still lived and bore leaves and shed or if some tree gone, vanished, burned for warmth and food years ago now or perhaps just gone; or if it had been one of the two posts themselves, thinking, wishing that Henry were there now to stop Miss Coldfield and turn them back, telling himself that if Henry were there now, there would be no shot to be heard by anyone. 'She's going to try to stop me,' Miss Coldfield whimpered. 'I know she is. Maybe this far from town, out here alone at midnight, she will even let that Negro man ‐ And you didn't even bring a pistol. Did you?" 'Nome,' Quentin said.

'What is it she's got hidden there? What could it be? And what difference does it make? Let's go back to town, Miss Rosa."

She didn't answer this at all. She just said, 'That's what I have got to find out,' sitting forward on the seat, trembling now and peering up the tree‐arched drive toward where the rotting shell of the house would be.

'And now I will have to find it out,' she whimpered, in a kind of amazed self‐pity. She moved suddenly. 'Come,' she whispered, beginning to get out of the buggy. 'Wait,' Quentin said. 'Let's drive up to the house. It's a half a mile."

'No, no,' she whispered, a tense fierce hissing of words filled with that same curious terrified yet implacable determination, as though it were not she who had to go and find out but she only the helpless agent of someone or something else who must know. 'Hitch the horse here. Hurry."

She got out, scrambled awkwardly down, before he could help her, clutching the umbrella. It seemed to him that he could still hear her whimpering panting where she waited close beside one of the posts while he led the mare from the road and tied one rein about a sapling in the weed‐choked ditch. He could not see her at all, so close she stood against the post: she just stepped out and fell in beside him when he passed and turned into the gate, still breathing in those whimpering pants as they walked on up the rutted tree‐arched drive. The darkness was intense; she stumbled; he caught her. She took his arm, clutching it in a dead rigid hard grip as if her fingers, her hand, were a small mass of wire. 'I will have to take your arm,' she whispered, whimpered. 'And you haven't even got a pistol ‐ Wait,' she said. She stopped. He turned; he could not see her but he could hear her hurried breathing and then a rustling of cloth. Then she was prodding something at him.

Here,' she whispered. 'Take it." It was a hatchet; not sight but touch told him ‐ a hatchet with a heavy worn handle and a heavy gapped rust‐dulled blade.

'What?" he said.

'Take it!" she whispered, hissed. 'You didn't bring a pistol.

It's something."

'Here,' he said; 'wait."

'Come,' she whispered. 'You will have to let me take your arm, I am trembling so bad." They went on again, she clinging to one of his arms, the hatchet in his other hand.

'We will probably need it to get into the house, anyway,' she said, stumbling along beside him, almost dragging him. 'I just know she is somewhere watching us,' she whimpered. 'I can feel her.

But if we can just get to the house, get into the house ‐' The drive seemed interminable.

He knew the place. He had walked from the gate to the house as a child, a boy, when distances seem really long (so that to the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone) yet now it seemed to him that the house would never come in sight: so that presently he found himself repeating her words: "If we can just get to the house, get inside the house," telling himself, recovering himself in that same breath: "I am not afraid. I just don't want to be here. I just don't want to know about whatever it is she keeps hidden in it." But they reached it at last. It loomed, bulked, square and enormous, with jagged half‐toppled chimneys, its roofline sagging a little; for an instant as they moved, hurried, toward it Quentin saw completely through it a ragged segment of sky with three hot stars in it as if the house were of one dimension, painted on a canvas curtain in which there was a tear; now, almost beneath it, the dead furnace‐breath of air in which they moved seemed to reek in slow and protracted violence with a smell of desolation and decay as if the wood of which it was built were flesh. She was trotting beside him now, her hand trembling on his arm yet gripping it still with that lifeless and rigid strength; not talking, not saying words, yet producing a steady whimpering, almost a moaning, sound. Apparently she could not see at all now, so that he had to guide her toward where he knew the steps would be and then restrain her, whispering, hissing, aping without knowing it her own tense fainting haste: ' Wait. This way. Be careful, now. They're rotten." He almost lifted, carried, her up the steps, supporting her from behind by both elbows as you lift a child; he could feel something fierce and implacable and dynamic driving down the thin rigid arms and into his palms and up his own arms; lying in the Massachusetts bed he remembered how he thought, knew, said suddenly to himself, "Why, she's not afraid at all. It's something. But she's not afraid," feeling her flee out of his hands, hearing her feet cross the gallery, overtaking her where she now stood beside the invisible front door, panting.

'Now what?" he whispered.

'Break it,' she whispered. 'It will be locked, nailed. You have the hatchet. Break it."

'But ‐' he began.

'Break it!" she hissed, 'It belonged to Ellen. I am her sister, her only living heir. Break it.

Hurry." He pushed against the door.

It did not move.

She panted beside him. 'Hurry,' she said. ' Break it."

'Listen, Miss Rosa,' he said. 'Listen."

'Give me the hatchet."

'Wait,' he said.

'Do you really want to go inside?"

'I'm going inside,' she whimpered.

'Give me the hatchet."

'Wait,' he said. He moved along the gallery, guiding himself by the wall, moving carefully since he did not know just where the floor planks might be rotten or even missing, until he came to a window. The shutters were closed and apparently locked, yet they gave almost at once to the blade of the hatchet, making not very much sound‐ a flimsy and sloven barricading done either by an old feeble person ‐ woman‐ or by a shiftless man; he had already inserted the hatchet blade beneath the sash before he discovered that there was no glass in it, that all he had to do now was to step through the vacant frame. Then he stood there for a moment, telling himself to go on in, telling himself that he was not afraid, he just didn't want to know what might be inside. ' Well?" Miss Coldfield whispered from the door. 'Have you opened it?"

'Yes,' he said. He did not whisper, though he did not speak overloud; the dark room which he faced repeated his voice with hollow profundity, as an unfurnished room will. 'You wait there. I'll see if I can open the door." ‐ "So now I shall have to go in," he thought, climbing over the sill. He knew that the room was empty; the echo of his voice had told him that, yet he moved as slowly and carefully here as he had along the gallery, feeling along the wall with his hand, following the wall when it turned, and found the door and passed through it. He would be in the hall now; he almost believed that he could hear Miss Coldfield breathing just beyond the wall beside him. It was pitch dark; he could not see, he knew that he could not see, yet he found that his eyelids and muscles were aching with strain while merging and dissolving red spots wheeled and vanished across the retinae. He went on; he felt the door under his hand at last and now he could hear Miss Coldfield's whimpering breathing beyond it as he fumbled for the lock. Then behind him the sound of the scraped match was like an explosion, a pistol; even before the puny following light appeared all his organs lifted sickeningly; he could not even move for a moment even though something of sanity roared silently inside his skull: "It's all right! If it were danger, he would not have struck the match!"

Then he could move, and turned to see the tiny gnomelike creature in headrag and voluminous skirts, the worn coffee‐colored face staring at him, the match held in one coffee‐colored and doll‐like hand above her head. Then he was not watching her but watching the match as it burned down toward her fingers; he watched quietly as she moved at last and lit a second match from the first and turned; he saw then the square‐ended saw chunk beside the wall and the lamp sitting upon it as she lifted the chimney and held the match to the wick. He remembered it, lying here in the Massachusetts bed and breathing fast now, now that peace and quiet had fled again. He remembered how she did not say one word to him, not Who are you? or What do you want here?

but merely came with a bunch of enormous old‐fashioned iron keys, as if she had known all the time that this hour must come and that it could not be resisted, and opened the door and stepped back a little as Miss Coldfield entered. And how she (Clytie) and Miss Coldfield said no word to one another, as if Clytie had looked once at the other woman and knew that that would do no good; that it was to him, Quentin, that she turned, putting her hand on his arm and saying, 'Dont let her go up there, young marster." And how maybe she looked at him and knew that would do no good either, because she turned and overtook Miss Coldfield and caught her arm and said, 'Dont you go up there, Rosie'

and Miss Coldfield struck the hand away and went on toward the stairs (and now he saw that she had a flashlight; he remembered how he thought, "It must have been in tie umbrella too along with the axe") and Clytie said; 'Rosie' and ran after the other again, whereupon Miss Coldfield turned on the step and struck Clytie to the floor with a full‐armed blow like a man would have, and turned and went on up the stairs.

She (Clytie) lay on the bare floor of the scaling and empty hall like a small shapeless bundle of quiet clean rags. When he reached her he saw that she was quite conscious, her eyes wide open and calm; he stood above her, thinking, "Yes. She is the one who owns the terror."

When he raised her it was like picking up a handful of sticks concealed in a rag bundle, so light she was.

She could not stand; he had to hold her up, aware of some feeble movement or intention in her limbs until he realized that she was trying to sit on the bottom step. He lowered her to it. 'Who are you?" she said. 'I'm Quentin Compson,' he answered.

'Yes. I remember your grandpaw. You go up there and make her come down.

Make her go away from here. Whatever he done, me and Judith and him have paid it out.

You go and get her. Take her away from here." So he mounted the stairs, the worn bare treads, the cracked and scaling wall on one side, the balustrade with its intermittent missing spindles on the other. He remembered how he looked back and she was still sitting as he had left her, and that now (and he had not heard him enter) there stood in the hall below a hulking young lightcolored Negro man in clean faded overalls and shirt, his arms dangling, no surprise, no nothing in the saddle‐colored and slack‐mouthed idiot face. He remembered how he thought, "The scion, the heir, the apparent (though not obvious)" and how he heard Miss Coldfield's feet and saw the light of the torch approaching along the upper hall and how she came and passed him, how she stumbled a little and caught herself and looked full at him as if she had never seen him before ‐ the eyes wide and unseeing like a sleepwalker's, the face which had always been tallow‐hued now possessing some still profounder, some almost unbearable, quality of bloodlessness and he thought, "What? What is it now? It's not shock. And it never has been fear.

Can it be triumph?" and how she passed him and went on. He heard Clytie say to the man,

"Take her to the gate, the buggy" and he stood there thinking, "I should go with her" and then, "But I must see too now. I will have to. Maybe I shall be sorry tomorrow, but I must see." So when he came back down the stairs (and he remembered how he thought, "Maybe my face looks like hers did, but it's not triumph") there was only Clytie in the hall, sitting still on the bottom step, sitting still in the attitude in which he had left her. She did not even look at him when he passed her. Nor did he overtake Miss Coldfield and the Negro. It was too dark to go fast, thought he could presently hear them ahead of him. She was not using the flashlight now; he remembered how he thought, "Surely she cant be afraid to show a light now." But she was not using it and he wondered if she were holding to the Negro's arm now; he wondered that until he heard the Negro's voice, flat, without emphasis or interest: "Wawkin better over here" and no answer from her, though he was close enough now to hear (or believe he did) her whimpering panting breath.

Then he heard the other sound and he knew that she had stumbled and fallen; he could almost see the hulking slack‐faced Negro stopped in his tracks, looking toward the sound of the fall, waiting, without interest or curiosity, as he (Quentin) hurried forward, hurried toward the voices:

'You, nigger! What's your name?" 'Calls me Jim Bond."

'Help me up! You aint any Sutpen! You don't have to leave me lying in the dirt!"

When he stopped the buggy at her gate she did not offer to get out alone this time. She sat there until he got down and came round to her side; she still sat there, clutching the umbrella in one hand and the hatchet in the other, until he spoke her name. Then she stirred; he helped, lifted her down; she was almost as light as Clytie had been; when she moved it was like a mechanical doll, so that he supported and led her through the gate and up the short walk and into the dollsized house and turned on the light for her and looked at the fixed sleep‐walking face, the wide dark eyes as she stood there, still clutching the umbrella and the hatchet, the shawl and the black dress both stained with dirt where she had fallen, the black bonnet jerked forward and awry by the shock of the fall.

'Are you all right now?" he said.

'Yes,' she said. 'Yes. I'm all right. Goodnight." ‐ "Not thank you," he thought: "Just goodnight,"

outside the house now, breathing deep and fast now as he returned to the buggy, finding that he was about to begin to run, thinking quietly, "Jesus. Jesus. Jesus," breathing fast and hard of the dark dead furnace‐breath of air, of night where the fierce aloof stars hung. His own home was dark; he was still using the whip when he turned into the lane and then into the stable lot. He sprang out and took the mare from the buggy, stripping the harness from her and tumbling it into the harness room without stopping to hang it up, sweating, breathing fast and hard; when he turned at last toward the house he did begin to run. He could not help it. He was twenty years old; he was not afraid, because what he had seen out there could not harm him, yet he ran; even inside the dark familiar house, his shoes in his hand, he still ran, up the stairs and into his room and began to undress, fast, sweating, breathing fast. "I ought to bathe," he thought: then he was lying on the bed, naked, swabbing his body steadily with the discarded shirt, sweating still, panting: so that when, his eye‐muscles aching and straining into the darkness and the almost dried shirt still clutched in his hand, he said "I have been asleep" it was all the same, there was no difference: waking or sleeping he walked down that upper hall between the scaling walls and beneath the cracked ceiling, toward the faint light which fell outward from the last door and paused there, saying "No. No" and then "Only I must. I have to" and went in, entered the bare, stale room whose shutters were closed too, where a second lamp burned dimly on a crude table; waking or sleeping it was the same; the bed, the yellow sheets and pillow, the wasted yellow face with closed, almost transparent eyes on the pillow, the wasted hands, crossed on the breast as if he were already a corpse; waking or sleeping it was the same and would be the same forever as long as he lived: And you are ‐? Henry Sutpen. And you have been here ‐? Four years. And you came home ‐? To die. Yes.

To die‐? Yes. To die. And you have been here ‐? Four years. And you are ‐? Henry Sutpen.

It was quite cold in the room now; the chimes would ring for one any time now; the chill had a compounded, a gathered quality, as though preparing for the dead moment before dawn. 'And she waited three months before she went back to get him,' Shreve said. 'Why did she do that?" Quentin didn't answer. He lay still and rigid on his back with the cold New England night on his face and the blood running warm in his rigid body and limbs, breathing hard but slow, his eyes wide open upon the window, thinking "Nevermore of peace. Nevermore of peace.

Nevermore Nevermore Nevermore." 'Do you suppose it was because she knew what was going to happen when she told it, took any steps, that it would be over then, finished, and that hating is like drink or drugs and she had used it so long that she did not dare risk cutting off the supply, destroying the source, the very poppy's root and seed?" Still Quentin didn't answer. ' But at last she did reconcile herself to it, for his sake, to save him, to bring him into town where the doctors could save him, and so she told it then, got the ambulance and the men and went out there. And old Clytie maybe watching for just that out of the upstairs window for three months now: and maybe even your old man was right this time and when she saw the ambulance turn into the gate she believed it was that same black wagon for which she probably had had that nigger boy watching for three months now, coming to carry Henry into town for the white folks to hang him for shooting Charles Bon. And I guess it had been him who had kept that closet under the stairs full of tinder and trash all that time too, like she told him to, maybe he not getting it then either but keeping it full just like she told him, the kerosene and all, for three months now, until the hour when he could begin to howl ‐' Now the chimes began, ringing for one o'clock. Shreve ceased, as if he were waiting for them to cease or perhaps were even listening to them. Quentin lay still too, as if he were listening too, though he was not; he just heard them without listening as he heard Shreve without listening or answering, until they ceased, died away into the icy air delicate and faint and musical as struck glass.

And he, Quentin, could see that too, though he had not been there ‐ the ambulance with Miss Coldfield between the driver and the second man, perhaps a deputy sheriff, in the shawl surely and perhaps even with the umbrella too, though probably no hatchet nor flashlight in it now, entering the gate and picking its way gingerly up the rutted and frozen (and now partially thawed) drive; and it may have been the howling or it may have been the deputy or the driver or it may have been she who cried first: "It's on fire!" though she would not have cried that; she would have said, 'Faster.

Faster,' leaning forward on this seat too the small furious grim implacable woman not much larger than a child. But the ambulance could not go fast in that drive; doubtless Clytie knew, counted upon, that; it would be a good three minutes before it could reach the house, the monstrous tinder‐dry rotten shell seeping smoke through the warped cracks in the weather‐boarding as if it were made of gauze wire and filled with roaring and beyond which somewhere something lurked which bellowed, something human since the bellowing was in human speech, even though the reason for it would not have seemed to be. And the deputy and the driver would spring out and Miss Coldfield would stumble out and follow them, running too, onto the gallery too, where the creature which bellowed followed them, wraith‐like and insubstantial, looking at them out of the smoke, whereupon the deputy even turned and whereupon he retreated, fled, though the howling did not diminish nor even seem to get any further away. They ran onto the gallery too, into the seeping smoke, Miss Coldfield screaming harshly, 'The window! The window!" to the second man at the door. But the door was not locked; it swung inward; the blast of heat struck them. The entire staircase was on fire. Yet they had to hold her; Quentin could see it: the light thin furious creature making no sound at all now, struggling with silent and bitter fury, clawing and scratching and biting at the two men who held her, who dragged her back and down the steps as the draft created by the open door seemed to explode like powder among the flames as the whole lower hall vanished. He, Quentin, could see it, could see the deputy holding her while the driver backed the ambulance to safety and returned, the three faces all a little wild now since they must have believed her ‐ the three of them staring, glaring at the doomed house: and then for a moment maybe Clytie appeared in that window from which she must have been watching the gates constantly day and night for three months ‐ the tragic gnome's face beneath the clean headrag, against a red background of fire, seen for a moment between two swirls of smoke, looking down at them, perhaps not even now with triumph and no more of despair than it had ever worn, possibly even serene above the melting clapboards before the smoke swirled across it again ‐and he, Jim Bond, the scion, the last of his race, seeing it too now and howling with human reason now since now even he could have known what he was howling about. But they couldn't catch him. They could hear him; he didn't seem to ever get any further away but they couldn't get any nearer and maybe in time they could not even locate the direction any more of the howling.

They ‐ the driver and the deputy ‐ held Miss Coldfield as she struggled: he (Quentin) could see her, them; he had not been there but he could see her, struggling and fighting like a doll in a nightmare, making no sound, foaming a little at the mouth, her face even in the sunlight lit by one last wild crimson reflection as the house collapsed and roared away, and there was only the sound of the idiot Negro left.

'And so it was the Aunt Rosa that came back to town inside the ambulance,' Shreve said.

Quentin did not answer; he did not even say, Miss Rosa. He just lay there staring at the window without. even blinking, breathing the chill heady pure snowgleamed darkness. 'And she went to bed because it was all finished now, there was nothing left now, nothing out there now but that idiot boy to lurk around those ashes and those four gutted chimneys and howl until someone came and drove him away. They couldn't catch him and nobody ever seemed to make him go very far away, he just stopped howling for a little while. Then after awhile they would begin to hear him again. And so she died." Quentin did not answer, staring at the window; then he could not tell if it was the actual window or the window's pale rectangle upon his eyelids, though after a moment it began to emerge.

It began to take shape in its same curious, light, gravity‐defying attitude ‐ the oncefolded sheet out of the wistaria Mississippi summer, the cigar smell, the random blowing of the fireflies. 'The South,'

Shreve said.

'The South. Jesus. No wonder you folks all outlive yourselves by years and years and years." It was becoming quite distinct; he would be able to decipher the words soon, in a moment; even almost now, now, now.

'I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died,' Quentin said.

'And more people have died than have been twenty‐one,' Shreve said. Now he (Quentin) could read it, could finish it ‐ the sloped whimsical ironic hand out of Mississippi attenuated, into the iron snow: * or perhaps there is. Surely it can harm no one to believe that perhaps she has escaped not at all the privilege of being outraged and dreaded and of not forgiving but on the contrary has herself gained that place or bourne where the objects of the outrage and of the commiseration also are no longer ghosts but are actual people to be actual recipients of the hatred and the pity. It will do no harm to hope ‐ You see I have written hope, not think. So let it be hope. ‐ that the one cannot escape the censure which no doubt he deserves, that the other no longer lack the commiseration which let us hope (while we are hoping) that they have longed for, if only for the reason that they are about to receive it whether they will or no. The weather was beautiful though cold and they had to use picks to break the earth for the grave yet in one of the deeper clods I saw a redworm doubtless alive when the clod was thrown up though by afternoon it was frozen again.

'So it took Charles Bon and his mother to get rid of old Tom, and Charles Bon and the octoroon to get rid of Judith, and Charles Bon and Clytie to get rid of Henry; and Charles Bon's mother and Charles Bon's grandmother got rid of Charles Bon. So it takes two niggers to get rid of one Sutpen, don't it?" Quentin did not answer; evidently Shreve did not want an answer now; he continued almost without a pause: 'Which is all right, it's fine; it clears the whole ledger, you can tear all the pages out and burn them, except for one thing. And do you know what that is?"

Perhaps he hoped for an answer this time, or perhaps he merely paused for emphasis, since he got no answer. 'You've got one nigger left. One nigger Sutpen left. Of course you can't catch him and you don't even always see him and you never will be able to use him. But you've got him there still.

You still hear him at night sometimes. Don't you?"

'Yes,' Quentin said.

'And so do you know what I think?" Now he did expect an answer, and now he got one: 'No,'

Quentin said.

'Do you want to know what I think?"

'No,' Quentin said.

'Then I'll tell you. I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it won't quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they won't show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings. Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?"

'I don't hate it,' Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; 'I don't hate it,' he said. I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don't. I don't!

I don't hate it! I don't hate it!

CHRONOLOGY

1807 Thomas Sutpen born in West Virginia mountains. Poor whites of Scottish‐English stock. Large family.

1817 Sutpen family moved down into Tidewater Virginia, Sutpen ten years old.

1818 Ellen Coldfield born in Tennessee.

1820 Sutpen ran away from home. Fourteen years old.

1827 Sutpen married first wife in Haiti.

1828 Goodhue Coldfield moved to Yoknapatawpha County (Jefferson) Mississippi: mother, sister, wife, and daughter Ellen.

1829 Charles Bon born, Haiti.

1831 Sutpen learns his wife has Negro blood, repudiates her and child.

1833 Sutpen appears in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, takes up land, builds his house.

1834 Clytemnestra (Clytie) born to slave woman.

1838 Sutpen married Ellen Coldfield.

1839 Henry Sutpen born, Sutpen's Hundred .1841 Judith Sutpen born.

1845 Rosa Coldfield born.

1850 Wash Jones moves into abandoned fishing camp on Sutpen's plantation, with his daughter.

1853 Milly Jones born to Wash Jones' daughter.

1859 Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon meet at University of Mississippi. Judith and Charles meet that Christmas.

Charles Etienne Saint Valery Bon born, New Orleans.

1860 Christmas, Sutpen forbids marriage between Judith and Bon. Henry repudiates his birthright, departs with Bon.

1861 SSutpen, Henry, and Bon depart for war.

1862 Ellen Coldfield dies.

1864 Goodhue Coldfield dies.

1865 Henry kills Bon at gates. Rosa Coldfield moves out to Sutpen's Hundred.

1866 Sutpen becomes engaged to Rosa Coldfield, insults her. She returns to Jefferson.

1867 Sutpen takes up with Milly Jones.

1869 Milly's child is born. Wash Jones kills Sutpen.

1870 Charles E. St V. Bon appears at Sutpen's Hundred.

1871 Clytie fetches Charles E. St V. Bon to Sutpen's Hundred to live.

1881 Charles E. St V. Bon returns with Negro wife.

1882 Jim Bond born.

1884 Judith and Charles E. St V. Bon die of smallpox.

1910 September

December

Rosa Coldfield and Quentin find Henry Sutpen hidden in the house.

Rosa Coldfield goes out to fetch Henry to town, Clytie sets fire to the house.

GENEALOGY

THOMAS SUTPEN Born in West Virginia mountains, 1807. One of several children of poor whites, Scotch‐English stock. Established plantation of Sutpen's Hundred in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, 1833. Married (x) Eulalia Bon, Haiti, 1827.

(2) Ellen Coldfield, Jefferson, Mississippi, 1838. Mayor, later Colonel,‐‐th Mississippi Infantry, C.S.A. Died, Sutpen's Hundred, 1869.

EULALIA BON Born in Haiti. Only child of Haitian sugar planter of French descent.

Married Thomas Sutpen, 1827, divorced from him, 1831. Died in New Orleans, date unknown.

CHARLES BON Son of Thomas and Eulalia Bon Sutpen. Only child.

Attended University of Mississippi, where he met Henry Sutpen and became engaged to Judith Private, later lieutenant,‐‐th Company, (University Grays)‐‐th Mississippi Infantry, C. S. A.

Died, Sutpen's Hundred, 1865.

GOODHUE COLDFIELD Born in Tennessee. Moved to Jefferson, Miss 1828, established small mercantile business. Died, Jefferson, 1864.

ELLEN COLDFIELD Daughter of Goodhue Coldfield. Born in Tennessee, 1818. Married Thomas Sutpen, Jefferson, Miss 1838. Died, Sutpen's Hundred, 1862.

ROSA COLDFIELD Daughter of Goodhue Coldfield. Born, Jefferson, 1845. Died, Jefferson, 1910.

HENRY SUTPEN Born, Sutpen's Hundred, 1839, son of Thomas and Ellen Coldfield Sutpen.

Attended University of Mississippi. Private,‐‐th Company, (University Grays)‐‐th Mississippi Infantry, C.S.A. Died, Sutpen's Hundred, 1910.

JUDITH SUTPEN Daughter o£ Thomas and Ellen Coldfield Sutpen. Born, Sutpen's.Hundred, I$4I.

Became engaged to Charles Bon, I$6o. Died, Sutpen's hundred, 1884. CLYTEMNESTRA SUTPEN Daughter of Thomas Sutpen and a Negro slave. Born, Sutpen's Hundred, I834. Died, Sutpen's Hundred, 9o.

WASH JONES Date and location of birth unknown. Squatter, residing in an abandoned fishing camp belonging to Thomas Sutpen, hanger‐on of Sutpen, handy man about Sutpen's place while Sutpen was away between '6I and '65. Died, Sutpen's Hundred, x869. MELICENT JONES Daughter of Wash Jones. Date of birth unknown.

. 'Why did she do that?" Quentin didn't answer. He lay still and rigid on his back with the cold New England night on his face and the blood running warm in his rigid body and limbs, breathing hard but slow, his eyes wide open upon the window, thinking "Nevermore of peace. Nevermore of peace.

Nevermore Nevermore Nevermore." 'Do you suppose it was because she knew what was going to happen when she told it, took any steps, that it would be over then, finished, and that hating is like drink or drugs and she had used it so long that she did not dare risk cutting off the supply, destroying the source, the very poppy's root and seed?" Still Quentin didn't answer. ' But at last she did reconcile herself to it, for his sake, to save him, to bring him into town where the doctors could save him, and so she told it then, got the ambulance and the men and went out there. And old Clytie maybe watching for just that out of the upstairs window for three months now: and maybe even your old man was right this time and when she saw the ambulance turn into the gate she believed it was that same black wagon for which she probably had had that nigger boy watching for three months now, coming to carry Henry into town for the white folks to hang him for shooting Charles Bon. And I guess it had been him who had kept that closet under the stairs full of tinder and trash all that time too, like she told him to, maybe he not getting it then either but keeping it full just like she told him, the kerosene and all, for three months now, until the hour when he could begin to howl ‐' Now the chimes began, ringing for one o'clock. Shreve ceased, as if he were waiting for them to cease or perhaps were even listening to them. Quentin lay still too, as if he were listening too, though he was not; he just heard them without listening as he heard Shreve without listening or answering, until they ceased, died away into the icy air delicate and faint and musical as struck glass.

And he, Quentin, could see that too, though he had not been there ‐ the ambulance with Miss Coldfield between the driver and the second man, perhaps a deputy sheriff, in the shawl surely and perhaps even with the umbrella too, though probably no hatchet nor flashlight in it now, entering the gate and picking its way gingerly up the rutted and frozen (and now partially thawed) drive; and it may have been the howling or it may have been the deputy or the driver or it may have been she who cried first: "It's on fire!" though she would not have cried that; she would have said, 'Faster.

Faster,' leaning forward on this seat too the small furious grim implacable woman not much larger than a child. But the ambulance could not go fast in that drive; doubtless Clytie knew, counted upon, that; it would be a good three minutes before it could reach the house, the monstrous tinder‐dry rotten shell seeping smoke through the warped cracks in the weather‐boarding as if it were made of gauze wire and filled with roaring and beyond which somewhere something lurked which bellowed, something human since the bellowing was in human speech, even though the reason for it would not have seemed to be. And the deputy and the driver would spring out and Miss Coldfield would stumble out and follow them, running too, onto the gallery too, where the creature which bellowed followed them, wraith‐like and insubstantial, looking at them out of the smoke, whereupon the deputy even turned and whereupon he retreated, fled, though the howling did not diminish nor even seem to get any further away. They ran onto the gallery too, into the seeping smoke, Miss Coldfield screaming harshly, 'The window! The window!" to the second man at the door. But the door was not locked; it swung inward; the blast of heat struck them. The entire staircase was on fire. Yet they had to hold her; Quentin could see it: the light thin furious creature making no sound at all now, struggling with silent and bitter fury, clawing and scratching and biting at the two men who held her, who dragged her back and down the steps as the draft created by the open door seemed to explode like powder among the flames as the whole lower hall vanished. He, Quentin, could see it, could see the deputy holding her while the driver backed the ambulance to safety and returned, the three faces all a little wild now since they must have believed her ‐ the three of them staring, glaring at the doomed house: and then for a moment maybe Clytie appeared in that window from which she must have been watching the gates constantly day and night for three months ‐ the tragic gnome's face beneath the clean headrag, against a red background of fire, seen for a moment between two swirls of smoke, looking down at them, perhaps not even now with triumph and no more of despair than it had ever worn, possibly even serene above the melting clapboards before the smoke swirled across it again ‐and he, Jim Bond, the scion, the last of his race, seeing it too now and howling with human reason now since now even he could have known what he was howling about. But they couldn't catch him. They could hear him; he didn't seem to ever get any further away but they couldn't get any nearer and maybe in time they could not even locate the direction any more of the howling.

They ‐ the driver and the deputy ‐ held Miss Coldfield as she struggled: he (Quentin) could see her, them; he had not been there but he could see her, struggling and fighting like a doll in a nightmare, making no sound, foaming a little at the mouth, her face even in the sunlight lit by one last wild crimson reflection as the house collapsed and roared away, and there was only the sound of the idiot Negro left.

'And so it was the Aunt Rosa that came back to town inside the ambulance,' Shreve said.

Quentin did not answer; he did not even say, Miss Rosa. He just lay there staring at the window without. even blinking, breathing the chill heady pure snowgleamed darkness. 'And she went to bed because it was all finished now, there was nothing left now, nothing out there now but that idiot boy to lurk around those ashes and those four gutted chimneys and howl until someone came and drove him away. They couldn't catch him and nobody ever seemed to make him go very far away, he just stopped howling for a little while. Then after awhile they would begin to hear him again. And so she died." Quentin did not answer, staring at the window; then he could not tell if it was the actual window or the window's pale rectangle upon his eyelids, though after a moment it began to emerge.

It began to take shape in its same curious, light, gravity‐defying attitude ‐ the oncefolded sheet out of the wistaria Mississippi summer, the cigar smell, the random blowing of the fireflies. 'The South,'

Shreve said.

'The South. Jesus. No wonder you folks all outlive yourselves by years and years and years." It was becoming quite distinct; he would be able to decipher the words soon, in a moment; even almost now, now, now.

'I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died,' Quentin said.

'And more people have died than have been twenty‐one,' Shreve said. Now he (Quentin) could read it, could finish it ‐ the sloped whimsical ironic hand out of Mississippi attenuated, into the iron snow: * or perhaps there is. Surely it can harm no one to believe that perhaps she has escaped not at all the privilege of being outraged and dreaded and of not forgiving but on the contrary has herself gained that place or bourne where the objects of the outrage and of the commiseration also are no longer ghosts but are actual people to be actual recipients of the hatred and the pity. It will do no harm to hope ‐ You see I have written hope, not think. So let it be hope. ‐ that the one cannot escape the censure which no doubt he deserves, that the other no longer lack the commiseration which let us hope (while we are hoping) that they have longed for, if only for the reason that they are about to receive it whether they will or no. The weather was beautiful though cold and they had to use picks to break the earth for the grave yet in one of the deeper clods I saw a redworm doubtless alive when the clod was thrown up though by afternoon it was frozen again.

'So it took Charles Bon and his mother to get rid of old Tom, and Charles Bon and the octoroon to get rid of Judith, and Charles Bon and Clytie to get rid of Henry; and Charles Bon's mother and Charles Bon's grandmother got rid of Charles Bon. So it takes two niggers to get rid of one Sutpen, don't it?" Quentin did not answer; evidently Shreve did not want an answer now; he continued almost without a pause: 'Which is all right, it's fine; it clears the whole ledger, you can tear all the pages out and burn them, except for one thing. And do you know what that is?"

Perhaps he hoped for an answer this time, or perhaps he merely paused for emphasis, since he got no answer. 'You've got one nigger left. One nigger Sutpen left. Of course you can't catch him and you don't even always see him and you never will be able to use him. But you've got him there still.

You still hear him at night sometimes. Don't you?"

'Yes,' Quentin said.

'And so do you know what I think?" Now he did expect an answer, and now he got one: 'No,'

Quentin said.

'Do you want to know what I think?"

'No,' Quentin said.

'Then I'll tell you. I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it won't quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they won't show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings. Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?"

'I don't hate it,' Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; 'I don't hate it,' he said. I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don't. I don't!

I don't hate it! I don't hate it!

CHRONOLOGY

1807 Thomas Sutpen born in West Virginia mountains. Poor whites of Scottish‐English stock. Large family.

1817 Sutpen family moved down into Tidewater Virginia, Sutpen ten years old.

1818 Ellen Coldfield born in Tennessee.

1820 Sutpen ran away from home. Fourteen years old.

1827 Sutpen married first wife in Haiti.

1828 Goodhue Coldfield moved to Yoknapatawpha County (Jefferson) Mississippi: mother, sister, wife, and daughter Ellen.

1829 Charles Bon born, Haiti.

1831 Sutpen learns his wife has Negro blood, repudiates her and child.

1833 Sutpen appears in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, takes up land, builds his house.

1834 Clytemnestra (Clytie) born to slave woman.

1838 Sutpen married Ellen Coldfield.

1839 Henry Sutpen born, Sutpen's Hundred .1841 Judith Sutpen born.

1845 Rosa Coldfield born.

1850 Wash Jones moves into abandoned fishing camp on Sutpen's plantation, with his daughter.

1853 Milly Jones born to Wash Jones' daughter.

1859 Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon meet at University of Mississippi. Judith and Charles meet that Christmas.

Charles Etienne Saint Valery Bon born, New Orleans.

1860 Christmas, Sutpen forbids marriage between Judith and Bon. Henry repudiates his birthright, departs with Bon.

1861 SSutpen, Henry, and Bon depart for war.

1862 Ellen Coldfield dies.

1864 Goodhue Coldfield dies.

1865 Henry kills Bon at gates. Rosa Coldfield moves out to Sutpen's Hundred.

1866 Sutpen becomes engaged to Rosa Coldfield, insults her. She returns to Jefferson.

1867 Sutpen takes up with Milly Jones.

1869 Milly's child is born. Wash Jones kills Sutpen.

1870 Charles E. St V. Bon appears at Sutpen's Hundred.

1871 Clytie fetches Charles E. St V. Bon to Sutpen's Hundred to live.

1881 Charles E. St V. Bon returns with Negro wife.

1882 Jim Bond born.

1884 Judith and Charles E. St V. Bon die of smallpox.

1910

September

December

Rosa Coldfield and Quentin find Henry Sutpen hidden in the house.

Rosa Coldfield goes out to fetch Henry to town, Clytie sets fire to the house.

GENEALOGY

THOMAS SUTPEN Born in West Virginia mountains, 1807. One of several children of poor whites, Scotch‐English stock. Established plantation of Sutpen's Hundred in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, 1833. Married (x) Eulalia Bon, Haiti, 1827.

(2) Ellen Coldfield, Jefferson, Mississippi, 1838. Mayor, later Colonel,‐‐th Mississippi Infantry, C.S.A. Died, Sutpen's Hundred, 1869.

EULALIA BON Born in Haiti. Only child of Haitian sugar planter of French descent.

Married Thomas Sutpen, 1827, divorced from him, 1831. Died in New Orleans, date unknown.

CHARLES BON Son of Thomas and Eulalia Bon Sutpen. Only child.

Attended University of Mississippi, where he met Henry Sutpen and became engaged to Judith Private, later lieutenant,‐‐th Company, (University Grays)‐‐th Mississippi Infantry, C. S. A.

Died, Sutpen's Hundred, 1865.

GOODHUE COLDFIELD Born in Tennessee. Moved to Jefferson, Miss 1828, established small mercantile business. Died, Jefferson, 1864.

ELLEN COLDFIELD Daughter of Goodhue Coldfield. Born in Tennessee, 1818. Married Thomas Sutpen, Jefferson, Miss 1838. Died, Sutpen's Hundred, 1862.

ROSA COLDFIELD Daughter of Goodhue Coldfield. Born, Jefferson, 1845.

Died, Jefferson, 1910.

HENRY SUTPEN Born, Sutpen's Hundred, 1839, son of Thomas and Ellen Coldfield Sutpen.

Attended University of Mississippi. Private,‐‐th Company, (University Grays)‐‐th Mississippi Infantry, C.S.A. Died, Sutpen's Hundred, 1910.

JUDITH SUTPEN Daughter of Thomas and Ellen Coldfield Sutpen.

Born, Sutpen's Hundred, 1841.

Became engaged to Charles Bon, 1860. Died, Sutpen's hundred, 1884.

CLYTEMNESTRA SUTPEN Daughter of Thomas Sutpen and a Negro slave.

Born, Sutpen's Hundred, 1834. Died, Sutpen's Hundred, 1910.

WASH JONES Date and location of birth unknown. Squatter, residing in an abandoned fishing camp belonging to Thomas Sutpen, hanger‐on of Sutpen, handy man about Sutpen's place while Sutpen was away between '61 and '65. Died, Sutpen's Hundred, 1869.

MELICENT JONES Daughter of Wash Jones. Date of birth unknown.

Rumored to have died in a Memphis brothel.

MILLY JONES Daughter of Melicent Jones. Born 1853. Died, Sutpen's Hundred, 1869.

UNNAMED INFANT Daughter of Thomas Sutpen and Milly Jones. Born, died, Sutpen's Hundred, same day, 1869.

CHARLES ETIENNE SAINT‐VALERY BON Only child of Charles Bon and an octoroon mistress whose name is not recorded. Born, New Orleans, 1859.

Married a full‐blood Negress, name unknown, 1879. Died, Sutpen's Hundred, 1884. jim BOND

(Bon) Son of Charles Etienne Saint‐Valery Bon. Born, Sutpen's Hundred, 1882.

Disappeared from Sutpen's Hundred, 1910.

Whereabouts unknown.

QUENTIN COMPSON Grandson of Thomas Sutpen's first Yoknapatawpha County friend.

Born, Jefferson, 1891. Attended Harvard, 1909‐10. Died, Cambridge, Mass., 1910.

SHREVLIN MCCANNON Born, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 1890.

Attended Harvard, 1909‐14. Captain, Royal Army Medical Corps, Canadian Expeditionary Forces, France, 1914‐18. Now a practising surgeon, Edmonton, Alta.

Absalom, Absalom!

Quentin Compson and Shreve, his Harvard room‐mate, are obsessed by the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen. As a poor white boy, Sutpen was turned away from a plantation owner's mansion by a Negro butler. From then on, Sutpen determined to be a Virginia plantation owner himself. .. but tragically his values remain those of the butler.

His ambitions are soon realized, plantation, marriage, children, his own troop to fight in the Civil War... but Sutpen returned to find his estate in ruins. Worse, Charles, son of Sutpen's first repudiated marriage to a partly coloured girl, seeks engagement to Sutpen's daughter, Judith. When Charles realizes this, he offers to give Up Judith for recognition by Sutpen.

Sutpen refuses, And, in time, his dynastic ambitions shrink to an idiot gibbering in an overgrown wilderness.

About the Author

William Faulkner was born near Oxford, Mississippi, in 1897. His great‐grandfather, Colonel William Falkner (so‐spelt) had been one of the wild characters of the South. The author, who had made little impression at school, was rejected by the U.S. Army when America entered the First World War but became a pilot in the Canadian Flying Corps. After the war he attended the University of Mississippi for a time and then for several years did odd jobs of many kinds. While working in New Orleans he met Sherwood Anderson, the novelist, who encouraged him: as a result he wrote his first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926). Others followed. It was in 1929, the year of his marriage, that he took a job as coal‐bearer on night‐work at the local power station and wrote As I lay Dying (193o) between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m. during a space of six summer weeks. He next wrote Sanctuary, intending it to be sensational enough to attract sales, which had not been good on his earlier books.

Later he worked on scripts in Hollywood, simply for the money.

Not long before his death in July, 1962, William Faulkner moved his home to Charlottesville, Virginia. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. His other books include Light in August (1932), The Wild Palms (1939), Go down, Moses (1944), Intruder in the Dust (1948), and Requiem for a qun (1951), all published in Penguins, as well as The Reivers (1962). ABSALOM, ABSALOM! WILLIAM FAULKNER