 SANCTUARY

BY

WILLIAM FAULKNER

 Other SIGNET Books by William Faulkner

 Intruder in the Dust      (#131848-50~)
 Knight's Gambit(#S1315-35~)
 Pylon         (#S1485-35~)
 Sartoris     (#131614-50~)
 Soldiers' Pay(#I)1629-50~)
 The Unvanquished(#CD9-500)
 The Wild Palms and The Old Man
                  (#D1643-500) The Long (Hot) Summer
 (Book III of "The Hamlet") (#S1501-350)

 The Sound and the Fury    (#D1628-500)

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 WILLIAM FAULKNER

      Sanctuary

           and

 Requiem for a Nun

                 
            

A SIGNET BOOK
Published by THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
                                      CoPYRIGHT, 1931, BY WILLIAM FAULKNER
 COPYRIGHT, 1950, 1951, BY WILLIAM FAULKNER

 Published as a SIGNET BOOK By Arrangement with Random House, Inc.

 FIRST JOINT PRINTING, MARCH, 1954
 SECOND PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1957
 THIRD PRINTING, AUGUST, 1958
 FOURTH PRINTING, JANUARY, 1961

 Sanctuary, as a separate SIGNET book, has had thirteen printings.

 SIGNET BOOKS are published by
 The New American Library of World Literature, Inc.
 501 Madison Avenue, New York 22, New York

 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
         SANCTUARY

                

 FROM BEYOND THE SCREEN OF BUSHES WHICH SURROUNDED the spring, Popeye watched
 the man drinking. A faint path led from the road to the spring. Popeye
 watched the mana tall, thin man, hatless, in worn gray flannel trousers and
 carrying a tweed coat over his arm--emerge from the path and kneel to drink
 from the spring.
  The spring welled up at the root of a beech tree and flowed away upon a
  bottom of whorled and waved sand. It was surrounded by a thick growth of
  cane and brier, of cypress and gum in which broken sunlight lay sourceless.
  Somewhere, hidden and secret yet nearby, a bird sang three notes and
  ceased.
  In the spring the drinking man leaned his face to the broken and myriad
  reflection of his own drinking. When he rose up he saw among them the
  scattered reflection of Popeye's straw hat, though he had heard no sound.
  He saw, facing him across the spring, a man of under size, his hands in his
  coat pockets, a cigarette slanted from his chin. His suit was black, with
  a tight, high-waisted coat. His trousers were rolled once and caked with
  mud above mud-caked shoes. His face had a queer, bloodless color, as though
  seen by electric light; against the sunny silence, in his slanted straw hat
  and his slightly akimbo arms, he had that vicious depthless quality of
  stamped tin.
  Behind him the bird sang again, three bars in monotonous repetition: a
  sound meaningless and profound out of a suspirant and peaceful following
  silence which seemed to isolate the spot, and out of which a moment later
  tame the sound of an automobile passing along a road and dying away.
  The drinking man knelt beside the spring. "You've got a pistol in that
  pocket, I suppose," he said.
  Across the spring Popeye appeared to contemplate him with two knobs of soft
  black rubber. "I'm asking you," Popeye said. "What's that in your pocket?"
The other man's coat wasstill across his arm. He lifted 5
 6          WILLIAM FAULKNER
 his other hand toward the coat, out of one pocket of which protruded a
 crushed felt hat, from the other a book. "Which pocket?" he said.
 "Dont show me," Popeye said. "Tell me."
 The other man stopped his hand. "It's a book."
 "What book?" Popeye said.
 "Just a book. The kind that people read. Some people do."
 "Do you read books?" Popeye said.
  The other man's hand was frozen above the coat. Across the spring they
  looked at one another. The cigarette wreathed its faint plume across
  Popeye's face, one side of his face squinted against the smoke like a
  mask carved into two simultaneous expressions.
  From his hip pocket Popeye took a soiled handkerchief and spread it upon
  his heels. Then he squatted, facing the man across the spring. That was
  about four o'clock on an afternoon in May. They squatted so, facing one
  another across the spring, for two hours. Now and then the bird sang back
  in the swamp, as though it were worked by a clock; twice more invisible
  automobiles passed along the highroad and died away. Again the bird sang.
  "And of course you dont know the name of it," the man across the spring
  said. "I dont suppose you'd know a bird at all, without it was singing
  in a cage in a hotel lounge, or cost four dollars on a plate." Popeye
  said nothing. He squatted in his tight black suit, his right-hand coat
  pocket sagging compactly against his flank, twisting and pinching
  cigarettes in his little, doll-like hands, spitting into the spring. His
  skin had a dead, dark pallor. His nose was faintly acquiline, and he had
  no chin at all. His face just went away, like the face of a wax doll set
  too near a hot fire and forgotten. Across his vest ran a platinum chain
  like a spider web. "Look here," the other man said. "My name is Horace
  Benbow. I'm a lawyer in Kinston. I used to live in Jefferson yonder; I'm
  on my way there now. Anybody in this country can tell you I am harmless.
  If it's whiskey, I dont care how much you all make or sell or buy. I just
  stopped here for a drink of water. All I want to do is to get to town,
  to Jefferson."
  Popeye's eyes looked like rubber knobs, like they'd give to the touch and
  ithen recover with the whorled smudge of the thumb on them.
  "I want to reach Jefferson before dark," Benbow said. "You cant keep me
  here like this."
  Without removing the cigarette Popeye spat past it into the spring.
  "You cant stop me like this," Benbow said. "Suppose I break and run."
            SANCTUARY             7

  Popeye put his eyes on Benbow, like rubber. "Do you want to run?"
 "No," Benbow said.
 Popeye removed his eyes. "Well, dont, then."
  Benbow heard the bird again, trying to recall the local name for it. On
  the invisible highroad another car passed, died away. Between them and
  the sound of it the sun was almost gone. From his trousers pocket Popeye
  took a dollar watch and looked at it and put it back in his pocket, loose
  like a coin.
  Where the path from the spring joined the sandy byroad a tree had been
  recently felled, blocking the road. They climbed over the tree and went
  on, the highroad now behind them. In the sand were two shallow parallel
  depressions, but no mark of hoof. Where the branch from the spring seeped
  across it Benbow saw the prints of automobile tires. Ahead of him Popeye
  walked, his tight suit and stiff hat all angles, like a modernistic
  lampstand.
  The sand ceased. The road rose, curving, out of the jungle. It was almost
  dark. Popeye looked briefly over his shoulder. "Step out, Jack," he said.
  "Why didn't we cut straight across up the hill?" Benbow said.
  "Through all them trees?" Popeye said. His hat jerked in a dull, vicious
  gleam in the twilight as he looked down the hill where the jungle already
  lay like a lake of ink, "Jesus Christ."
  It was almost dark. Popeye's gait had slowed. He walked now beside
  Benbow, and Benbow could see the continuous jerking of the hat from side
  to side as Popeye looked about with a sort of vicious cringing. The hat
  just reached Benbow's chin.
  Then something, a shadow shaped with speed, stooped at them and on,
  leaving a rush of air upon their very faces, on a soundless feathering
  of taut wings, and Benbow felt Popeye's whole body spring against him and
  his hand clawing at his coat. "It's just an owl," Benbow said. "It's
  nothing but an owl." Then he said: "They call that Carolina wren a
  fishingbird. That's what it is. What I couldn't think of back there,"
  with Popeye crouching against him, clawing at his pocket and hissing
  through his teeth like a cat. He smells black, Benbow thought; he smells
  like that black stuff that ran out of Bovary's mouth and down upon her
  bridal veil when they raised her head.
  A moment later, above a black, jagged mass of trees, the house lifted its
  stark square bulk against the failing sky.
 8          WILLIAM FAULKNER

  The house was a gutted ruin rising gaunt and stark out of a grove of
  unpruned cedar trees. It was a landmark, known as the Old Frenchman
  place, built before the Civil War; a plantation house set in the middle
  of a tract of land; of cotton fields and gardens and lawns long since
  gone back to jungle, which the people of the neighborhood had been pull-
  ing down piecemeal for firewood for fifty years or digging with secret
  and sporadic optimism for the gold which the builder was reputed to have
  buried somewhere about the place when Grant came through the county on
  his Vicksburg campaign.
  Three men were sitting in chairs on one end of the porch. In the depths
  of the open hall a faint light showed. The hall went straight back
  through the house. Popeye mounted the steps, the three men looking at him
  and his companion. "Here's the professor," he said, without stopping. He
  entered the house, the hall. He went on and crossed the back porch and
  turned and entered the room where the light was. It was the kitchen. A
  woman stood at the stove. She wore a faded calico dress. About her naked
  ankles a worn pair of man's brogans, unlaced, flapped when she moved. She
  looked back at Popeye, then to the stove again, where a pan of meat
  hissed.
  Popeye stood in the door. His hat was slanted across his face. He took
  a cigarette from his pocket, without producing the pack, and pinched and
  fretted it and put it into his mouth and snapped a match on his
  thumbnail. "There's a bird out front," he said.
  The woman did not look around. She turned the meat. "Why tell me?" she
  said. "I dont serve Lee's customers."
 "It's a professor," Popeye said.
  The woman turned, an iron fork suspended in her hand. Behind the stove,
  in shadow, was a wooden box. "A what?"
 "Professor," Popeye said. "He's got a book with him."
 "What's he doing here?"
  "I dont know. I never thought to ask. Maybe to read the book."
 "He came here?"
 "I found him at the spring."
 "Was he trying to find this house?"
  "I dont know," Popeye said. "I never thought to ask." The woman was still
  looking at him. "I'll send him on to Jefferson on the truck," Popeye
  said. "He said he wants to go there."
 "Why tell me about it?" the woman said.
 "You cook. He'll want to eat."
  "Yes," the woman said. She turned back to the stove. "I cook. I cook for
  crimps and spungs and feebs. Yes. I cook."
            SANCTUARY             9
  In the door Popeye watched her, the cigarette curling across his face. His
  hands were in his pockets. "You can quit. I'll take you back to Memphis
  Sunday. You can go to hustling again." He watched her back. "You're getting
  fat here. Laying off in the country. I wont tell them on Manuel Street."
  The woman turned, the fork in her hand. "You bastard," she said.
  "Sure," Popeye said. "I won't tell them that Ruby Lamar is down in the
  country, wearing a pair of Lee Goodwin's throwed-away shoes, chopping her
  own firewood. No. I'll tell them Lee Goodwin is big rich."
 "You bastard," the woman said. "You bastard."
  "Sure," Popeye said. Then he turned his head. There was a shuffling sound
  across the porch, then a man entered. He was stooped, in overalls. He was
  barefoot; it was his bare feet which they had heard. He had a sunburned
  thatch of hair, matted and foul. He had pale furious eyes, a short soft
  beard like dirty gold in color.
 "I be dawg if he aint a case, now," he said.
  "What do you want?" the woman said. The man in overalls didn't answer. In
  passing, he looked at Popeye with a glance at once secret and alert, as
  though he were ready to laugh at a joke, waiting for the time to laugh. He
  crossed the kitchen with a shambling, bear-like gait, and still with that
  air of alert and gleeful secrecy, though in plain sight of them, he removed
  a loose board in the floor and took out a gallon jug. Popeye watched him,
  his forefingers in his vest, the cigarette (he had smoked it down without
  once touching it with his hand) curling across his face. His expression was
  savage, perhaps baleful; contemplative, watching the man in overalls
  recross the floor with a kind of alert diffidence, the jug clumsily con-
  cealed below his flank; he was watching Popeye, with that expression alert
  and ready for mirth, until he left the room. Again they heard his bare feet
  on the porch.
  "Sure," Popeye said. "I wont tell them on Manuel Street that Ruby Lamar is
  cooking for a dummy and a feeb too."
 "You bastard," the woman said. "You bastard."

                III

 WHEN THE WOMAN ENTERED THE DINING-ROOM, CARRYING
 a platter of meat, Popeye and the man who had fetched the jug from the
 kitchen and the stranger were already at a table made by nailing three rough
 planks to two trestles. Coming into the light of the lamp which sat on the
 table, her face was sullen, not old; her eyes were cold. Watching her,
 Benbow
        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 did not see her look once at him as she set the platter on the table and
 stood for a moment with that veiled look with which women make a final
 survey of a table, and went and stooped above an open packing case in a
 corner of the room and took from it another plate and knife and fork,
 which she brought to the table and set before Benbow with a kind of abrupt
 yet unhurried finality, her sleeve brushing his shoulder.
  As she was doing that, Goodwin entered. He wore muddy overalls. He had
  a lean, weathered face, the jaws covered by a black stubble; his hair was
  gray at the temples. He was leading by the arm an old man with a long
  white beard stained about the mouth. Benbow watched Goodwin seat the old
  man in a chair, where he sat obediently with that tentative and abject
  eagerness of a man who has but one pleasure left and whom the world can
  reach only through one sense, for he was both blind and deaf: a short man
  with a bald skull and a round, full-fleshed, rosy face in which his
  cataracted eyes looked like two clots of phlegm. Benbow watched him take
  a filthy rag from his pocket and regurgitate into the rag an almost
  colorless wad of what had once been chewing tobacco, and fold the rag up
  and put it into his pocket. The woman served his plate from the dish. The
  others were already eating, silently and steadily, but the old man sat
  there, his head bent over his plate, his beard working faintly. He
  fumbled at the plate with a diffident, shaking hand and found a small
  piece of meat and began to suck at it until the woman returned and rapped
  his knuckles. He put the meat back on the plate then and Benbow watched
  her cut up the food on the plate, meat, bread and all, and then pour
  sorghum over it. Then Benbow quit looking. When the meal was over,
  Goodwin led the old man out again. Benbow watched the two of them pass
  out the door and heard them go up the hall.
  The men returned to the porch. The women cleared the table and carried
  the dishes to the kitchen. She set them on the table and she went to the
  box behind the stove and she stood over it for a time. Then she returned
  and put her own supper on a plate and sat down to the table and ate and
  lit a cigarette from the lamp and washed the dishes and put them away.
  Then she went back up the hall. She did not go out onto the porch. She
  stood just inside the door, listening to them talking, listening to the
  stranger talking and to the thick, soft sound of the jug as they passed
  it among themselves. "That fool," the woman said. "What does he want. .
  . ." She listened to the stranger's voice; a quick, faintly outlandish
  voice, the voice of a man given to much talk and not much else. "Not to
  drinking, anyway," the woman said, quiet inside the door. "He better get
            SANCTUARY            11
 on to where he's going, where his women folks can take care of him."
  She listened to him. "From my window I could see the grape arbor, and in
  the winter I could see the hammock too. That's why we know nature is a she;
  because of that conspiracy between female flesh and female season. So each
  spring I could watch the reaffirmation of the old ferment hiding the
  hammock; the green-snared promise of unease. What blossoms grapes have,
  this is. It's not much: a wild and waxlike bleeding less of bloom than
  leaf, hiding and hiding the hammock, until along in late May, in the
  twilight, her-Little Belle's-voice would be like the murmur of the wild
  grape itself. She never would say, 'Horace, this is Louis or Paul or
  Whoever' but 'It's just Horace.' Just, you see; in a little white dress in
  the twilight, the two of them all demure and quite alert and a little
  impatient. And I couldn't have felt any more foreign to her flesh if I had
  begot it myself.
  "So this morning-no; that was four days ago; it was Thursday she got home
  from school and this is Tuesday-1 said, 'Honey, if you found him on the
  train, he probably belongs to the railroad company. You cant take him from
  the railroad company; that's against the law, like the insulators on the
  poles.'
  'He's as good as you are. He goes to Tulane.'
  'But on a train, honey,' I said.
  'I've found them in worse places than on the train.'
  'I know,' I said. 'So have 1. But you don't bring them home, you know. You
  just step over them and go on. You don't soil your slippers, you know.'
  "We were in the living-room then; it was just before dinner; just the two
  of us in the house then. Belle had gone down town.
  " 'What business is it of yours who comes to see me? You're not my father.
  You're just-just-'
 :6 'WhatT I said. 'Just whatT
  "Tell Mother, thenl Tell her. That's what you're going to do. Tell herl'
  "'But on the train, honey,' I said. 'If he'd walked into your room in a
  hotel, I'd just kill him. But on the train, I'm disgusted. Let's send him
  along and start all over again.'
  " 'You're a fine one to talk about finding things on the train! You're a
  fine onel Shrimp! Shrimp!'"
  "He's crazy," the woman said, motionless inside the door. The stranger's
  voice went on tumbling over itself rapid and diffuse.
  "Then she was saying 'Nol No!' and me holding her and she clinging to me.
  'I didn't mean thatl Horacel Horacel' And
 12         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 I was smelling the slain flowers, the delicate dead flowers and tears, and
 then I saw her face in the mirror. There was a mirror behind her and
 another behind me, and she was watching herself in the one behind me
 forgetting about the other one in which I could see her face, see her
 watching the back of my head with pure dissimulation. That's why nature
 is 'she' and Progres~i is 'he'; nature made the grape arbor, but Progress
 invented the mirror."
 "He's crazy," the woman said inside the door listening.
  "But that wasn't quite it. I thought that maybe the spring, or maybe
  being forty-three years old, had upset me. I thought that maybe I would
  be all right if I just had a hill to lie on for a while- It was that
  country. Flat and rich and foul, so that the very winds seem to engender
  money out of it. Like you wouldn't be surprised to find that you could
  turn in the leaves off the trees, into the banks for cash. That Delta.
  Five thousand square miles, without any hill save the bumps of dirt the
  Indians made to stand on when the River overflowed.
  "So I thought it was just a hill I wanted; it wasn't Little Belle that
  set me off. Do you know what it was?"
  "He is," the woman said inside the door. "Lee ought not to let-"
  Benbow had not waited for any answer. "It was a rag with rouge on it. I
  knew I would find it before I went into Belle's room. And there it was,
  stuffed behind the mirror; a handkerchief where she had wiped off the
  surplus paint when she dressed and stuck it behind the mantel. I put it
  into the clothesbag and took my hat and walked out. I had got a lift on
  a truck before I found that I had no money with me. That was part of it
  too, you see; I couldn't cash a check. I couldn't get off the truck and
  go back to town and get some money. I couldn't do that. So I have been
  walking and bumming rides ever since. I slept one night in a sawdust pile
  at a mill, one night at a negro cabin, one night in a freight car on a
  siding. I just wanted a hill to lie on, you see. Then I would be all
  right. When you marry your own wife, you start off from scratch . . .
  maybe scratching. When you marry somebody else's wife, you start off
  maybe ten years behind, from somebody else's scratch and scratching. I
  just wanted a hill to lie on for a while."
  "The fool," the woman said. "The poor fool." She stood inside the door.
  Popeye came through the hall from the back. He passed her without a word
  and went onto the porch.
  "Come on," he said. "Let's get it loaded." She heard the three of them
  go away. She stood there. Then she heard the stranger get unsteadily out
  of his chair and cross the porch. Then she saw him, in faint silhouette
  against the sky, the
            SANCTUARY            13
 lesser darkness: a thin man in shapeless clothes; a head of thinning and
 ill-kempt hair; and quite drunk. "They don't make him eat right," the
 woman said.
  She was motionless, leaning lightly against the wall, he facing her. "Do
  you like living like this?" he said. "Why do you do it? You are young
  yet; you could go back to the cities and better yourself without lifting
  more than an eyelid." She didn't move, leaning lightly against the wall,
  her arms folded. "The poor, scared fool," she said.
  "You see," he said, "I lack courage: that was left out of me. The
  machinery is all here, but it wont run." His hand fumbled across her
  cheek. "You are young yet." She didn't move, feeling his hand upon her
  face, touching her flesh as though he were trying to learn the shape and
  position of her bones and the texture of the flesh. "You have your whole
  life before you, practically. How old are you? You're not past thirty
  yet." His voice was not loud, almost a whisper.
  When she spoke she did not lower her voice at all. She had not moved, her
  arms still folded across her breast. "Why did you leave your wife?" she
  said.
  "Because she ate shrimp," he said. "I couldn't-You see, it was Friday,
  and I thought how at noon I'd go to the station and get the box of shrimp
  off the train and walk home with it, counting a hundred steps and
  changing hands with it, and it-"
 "Did you do that every day?" the woman said.
  "No. Just Friday. But I have done it for ten years, since we were
  married. And I still don't like to smell shrimp. But I wouldn't mind the
  carrying it home so much. I could stand that. It's because the package
  drips. All the way home it drips and drips, until after a while I follow
  myself to the station and stand aside and watch Horace Benbow take that
  box off the train and start home with it, changing hands every hundred
  steps, and I following him, thinking Here lies Horace Benbow in a fading
  series of small stinking spots on a Mississippi sidewalk."
  "Oh," the woman said. She breathed quietly, her arms folded. She moved;
  he gave back and followed her down the hall. They entered the kitchen
  where a lamp burned. "You'll have to excuse the way I look," the woman
  said. She went to the box behind the stove and drew it out and stood
  above it, her hands hidden in the front of her garment. Benbow stood in
  the middle of the room. "I have to keep him in the box so the rats cant
  get to him," she said.
  "What?" Benbow said. "What is it?" He approached, where he could see into
  the box. It contained a sleeping child, not a year old. He looked down
  at the pinched face quietly.
 14         WILLIAM FAULKNER
  "Oh," he said. "You have a son." They looked down at the pinched, sleeping
  face of the child. There came a noise outside; feet came onto the back
  porch. The woman shoved the box back into the corner with her knee as
  Goodwin entered.
  "All right," Goodwin said. "Tommy'll show you the way to the truck." He
  went away, on into the house.
  Benbow looked at the woman. Her hands were still wrapped into her dress.
  "Thank you for the supper," he said. "Some day, maybe . . ." He looked at
  her; she was watching him, her face not sullen so much, as cold, still.
  "Maybe I can do something for you in Jefferson. Send you something you need
  . . ."
  She removed her hands from the fold of the dress in a turning, flicking
  motion; jerked them hidden again. "With all this dishwater and washing . .
  . You might send me an orange stick," she said.

  Walking in single file, Tommy and Benbow descended the hill from the house,
  following the abandoned road. Benbow looked back. The gaunt ruin of the
  house rose against the sky, above the massed and matted cedars, lightless,
  desolate, and profound. The road was an eroded scar too deep to be a road
  and too straight to be a ditch, gutted by winter freshets and choked with
  fern and rotted leaves and branches. Following Tommy, Benbow walked in a
  faint path where feet had wom the rotting vegetation down to the clay.
  Overhead an arching hedgerow of trees thinned against the sky.
  The descent increased, curving. "It was about here that we saw the owl,"
  Benbow said.
  Ahead of him Tommy guffawed. "It skeered him too, I'll be bound," he said.
  "Yes," Benbow said. He followed Tommy's vague shape, trying to walk
  carefully, to talk carefully, with that tedious concern of drunkenness.
  "I be a dog if he aint the skeeriest durn white man I ever seen," Tommy
  said. "Here he was comin' up the path to the porch and that ere dog come
  out from under the house and went up and sniffed his heels, like ere a dog
  will, and I be dog if he didn't flinch off like it was a moccasin and him
  barefoot, and whipped out that little artermatic pistol and shot it dead as
  a door-nail. I be burn if he didn't."
 "Whose dog was it?" Horace said.
  "Hit was mine," Tommy said. He chortled. "A old dog that wouldn't hurt a
  flea if hit could."
  The road descended and flattened; Benbow's feet whispered into sand,
  walking carefully. Against the pale sand he could now see Tommy, moving at
  a shuffling shamble like a mule walks in sand, without seeming effort, his
  bare feet hissing,
            SANCTUARY            15
 flicking the sand back in faint spouting gusts from each inward flick of
 his toes.
  The bulky shadow of the felled tree blobbed across the road. Tommy
  climbed over it and Benbow followed, still carefully, gingerly, hauling
  himself through a mass of foliage not yet withered, smelling still green.
  "Some more of----" Tommy said. He turned. "Can you make it?"
  "I'm all right," Horace said. He got his balance again. Tommy went on.
  "Some more of Popeye's doin's," Tommy said. "'Twarn't no use, blocking
  this road like this. Just fixed it so we'd have to walk a mile to the
  trucks. I told him folks been coming out here to buy from Lee for four
  years now, and aint nobody bothered Lee yet. Besides gettin' that car of
  his'n outen here again, big as it is. But 'twarn't no stoppin' him. I be
  dog if he ain't skeered of his own shadow."
  "I'd be scared of it too," Benbow said. "If his shadow was mine."
  Tommy guffawed, in undertone. The road was now a black tunnel floored
  with the impalpable defunctive glare of the sand. "It was about here that
  the path turned off to the spring," Benbow thought, trying to discern
  where the path notched into the jungle wall. They went on.
  "Who drives the truck?" Benbow said. "Some more Memphis fellows?"
 "Sho," Tommy said. "Hit's Popeye's truck."
  "Why can't those Memphis folks stay in Memphis and let you all make your
  liquor in peace?"
  "That's where the money is," Tommy said. "Aint no money in these here
  piddlin' little quarts and half-a-gallons. Lee just does that for
  a-commodation, to pick up a extry dollar or two. It's in making a run and
  getting shut of it quick, where the money is."
  "Oh," Benbow said. "Well, I think I'd rather starve than have that man
  around me."
  Tommy guffawed. "Popeye's all right. He's just a little curious." He
  walked on, shapeless against the bushed glare of the road, the sandy
  road. "I be dog if he aint a case, now. Aint he?"
 "Yes," Benbow said. "He's all of that."
  The truck was waiting where the road, clay again, began to mount toward
  the gravel highway. Two men sat on the fender, smoking cigarettes;
  overhead the trees thinned against the stars of more than midnight.
  "You took your time," one of the men said. "Didn't you? I aimed to be
  halfway to town by now. I got a woman waiting for me."
 16         WILLIAM FAULKNER

  "Sure," the other man said. "Waiting on her back." The first man cursed
  him.
  "We come as fast as we could," Tommy said. "Whyn't you fellows hang out
  a lantern? If me and him had a been the Law, we'd had you, sho."
  "Ah, go climb a tree, you mat-faced bastard," the first man said. They
  snapped their cigarettes away and got into the truck. Tommy guffawed, in
  undertone. Benbow turned and extended his hand.
 "Goodbye," he said. "And much obliged, Mister--"
  "My name's Tawmmy," the other said. His limp, calloused hand fumbled into
  Benbow's and pumped it solemnly once and fumbled away. He stood there,
  a squat, shapeless figure against the faint glare of the road, while
  Benbow lifted his foot for the step. He stumbled, catching himself.
  "Watch yourself, Doc," a voice from the cab of the truck said. Benbow got
  in. The second man was laying a shotgun along the back of the seat. The
  truck got into motion and ground terrifically up the gutted slope and
  into the gravelled highroad and turned toward Jefferson and Memphis.

                III

 ON THE NEXT AFTERNOON BENBOW WAS AT HIS SISTER'S home. It was in the
 country, four miles from Jefferson; the home of her husband's people. She
 was a widow, with a boy ten years old, living in a big house with her son
 and the great aunt of her husband: a woman of ninety, who lived in a wheel
 chair, who was known as Miss Jenny. She and Benbow were at the window,
 watching his sister and a young man walking in the garden. His sister had
 been a widow for ten years.
 "Why hasn't she ever married again?" Benbow said.
  "I ask you," Miss Jenny said. "A young woman needs a man."
  "But not that one," Benbow said. He looked at the two people. The man
  wore flannels and a blue coat; a broad, plumpish young man with a
  swaggering air, vaguely collegiate. "She seems to like children. Maybe
  because she has one of her own now. Which one is that? Is that the same
  one she had last fall?"
  "Gowan Stevens," Miss Jenny said. "You ought to remember Gowan."
  "Yes," Benbow said. "I do now. I remember last October." At that time he
  had passed through Jefferson on his way home, and he had stopped
  overnight at his sister's. Through the same window he and Miss Jenny had
  watched the same two people walking in the same garden, where at that
  time
            SANCTUARY             17
 the late, bright, dusty-odored flowers of October bloomed. At that time
 Stevens wore brown, and at that time he was new to Horace.
  "He's only been coming out since he got home from Virginia last spring,"
  Miss Jenny said. "The one then was that Jones boy; Herschell. Yes.
  Herschell."
  "Ah," Benbow said. "An F.F.V., or just an unfortunate sojourner there?"
  "At the school, the University. He went there. You dont remember him
  because he was still in diapers when you left Jefferson."
  "Dont let Belle hear you say that," Benbow said. He watched the two
  people. They approached the house and disappeared beyond it. A moment
  later they came up the stairs and into the room. Stevens came in, with
  his sleek head, his plump, assured face. Miss Jenny gave him her hand and
  he bent fatly and kissed it.
  "Getting younger and prettier every day," he said. "I was just telling
  Narcissa that if you'd just get up out of that chair and be my girl, she
  wouldn't have a chance."
 "I'm going to tomorrow," Miss Jenny said. "Narcissa-"
  Narcissa was a big woman, with dark hair, a broad, stupid, serene face.
  She was in her customary white dress. "Horace this is Gowan Stevens," she
  said. "My brother, Gowan."
  "How do you do, sir," Gowan said. He gave Benbow's hand a quick, hard,
  high, close grip. At that moment the boy, Benbow Sartoris, Benbow's
  nephew, came in. "I've heard of you," Stevens said.
 "Gowan went to Virginia," the boy said.
 "Ah," Benbow said. "I've heard of it."
  "Thanks," Stevens said. "But everybody cant go to Harvard."
 "Thank you," Benbow said. "It was Oxford."
  "Horace is always telling folks he went to Oxford so they'll think he
  means the state university, and he can tell them different," Miss Jenny
  said.
  "Gowan goes to Oxford a lot," the boy said. "He's got a jelly there. He
  takes her to the dances. Don't you, Gowan?"
 "Right, bud," Stevens said. "A red-headed one."
  "Hush, Bory," Narcissa said. She looked at her brother. "How are Belle
  and Little Belle?" She almost said something else, then she ceased. Yet
  she looked at her brother, her gaze grave and intent.
  "If you keep on expecting him to run off from Belle, he will do it," Miss
  Jenny said. "He'll do it someday. But Narcissa wouldn't be satisfied,
  even then," she said. "Some women
 18         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 wont want a man to marry a certain woman. But all the women will be mad
 if he ups and leaves her."
 "You bush, now," Narcissa said.
  "Yes, Sir," Miss Jenny said. "Horace has been bucking at the halter for
  some time now. But you better not run against it too hard, Horace; it
  might not be fastened at the other end."
  Across the hall a small bell rang. Stevens and Benbow both moved toward
  the handle of Miss Jenny's chair. "Will you forbear, Sir?" Benbow said.
  "Since I seem to be the guest."
  "Why, Horace," Miss Jenny said. "Narcissa will you send up to the chest
  in the attic and get the duelling pistols?" She turned to the boy. "And
  you go on ahead and tell them to strike up the music, and to have two
  roses ready."
 "Strike up what music?" the boy said.
  "There are roses on the table," Narcissa said. "Gowan sent them. Come on
  to supper."

  Through the window Benbow and Miss Jenny watched the two people, Narcissa
  still in white, Stevens in flannels and a blue coat, walking in the
  garden. "The Virginia gentleman one, who told us at supper that night
  about how they had taught him to drink like a gentleman. Put a beetle in
  alcohol, and you have a scarab; put a Mississippian in alcohol, and you
  have a gentleman-"
  "Gowan Stevens," Miss Jenny said. They watched the two people disappear
  beyond the house. It was some time before he heard the two people come
  down the hall. When they entered, it was the boy instead of Stevens.
  "He wouldn't stay," Narcissa said. "He's going to Oxford. There is to be
  a dance at the University Friday night. He has an engagement with a young
  lady."
  "He should find ample field for gentlemanly drinking there," Horace said.
  "Gentlemanly anything else. I suppose that's why he is going down ahead
  of time."
 I "Taking an old girl to a dance," the boy said. "He's going to Starkville
 Saturday to the baseball game. He said he'd take me, but you won't let me
 go."

                IV

 TOWNSPEOPLE TAKING AFTER-SUPPER DRIVES THROUGH THE college grounds or an
 oblivious and bemused faculty-member or a candidate for a master's degree
 on his way to the library would see Temple, a snatched coat under her arm
 and her long legs blonde with running, in speeding silhouette against the
 lighted windows of the Coop, as the women's dormitory was known, vanishing
 into the shadow beside the library wall,
            SANCTUARY            19
 and perhaps a final squatting swirl of knickers or whatnot as she sprang
 into the car waiting there with engine running on that particular night.
 The cars belonged to town boys. Students in the University were not
 permitted to keep cars, and the men -hatless in knickers and bright
 pull-overs-looked down upon the town boys who wore hats cupped rigidly
 upon pomaded heads, and coats a little too tight and trousers a little too
 full, with superiority and rage.
  This was on week nights. On alternate Saturday evenings, at the Letter
  Club dances, or on the occasion of the three formal yearly balls, the
  town boys, lounging in attitudes of belligerent casualness with their
  identical hats and upturned collars watched her enter the gymnasium upon
  black collegiate arms and vanish in a swirling blitter upon a glittering
  swirl of music with her high delicate head and her bold painted mouth and
  soft chin, her eyes blankly right and left looking, cool, predatory and
  discreet.
  Later, the music wailing beyond the glass, they would watch her through
  the windows as she passed in swift rotation from one pair of black
  sleeves to the next, her waist shaped slender and urgent in the interval,
  her feet filling the rhythmic gap with music. Stooping they would drink
  from flasks and light cigarettes, then erect again, motionless against
  the light, the upturned collars, the hatted heads, would be like a row
  of hatted and muffled busts cut from black tin and nailed to the
  window-sills.
  There would always be three or four of them there when the band played
  Home, Sweet Home, lounging near the exit, their faces cold, bellicose,
  a little drawn with sleeplessness, watching the couples emerge in a wan
  aftermath of motion and noise. Three of them watched Temple and Gowan
  Stevens come out, into the chill presage of spring dawn. Her face was
  quite pale, dusted over with recent powder, her hair in spent red curls.
  Her eyes, all pupils now, rested upon them for a blank moment. Then she
  lifted her hand in a wan gesture, whether at them or not, none could have
  said. They did not respond, no flicker in their cold eyes. They watched
  Gowan slip his arm into hers, and the fleet revelation of flank and thigh
  as she got into his car. It was a long, low roadster, with a jacklight.
 "Who's that son bitch?" one said.
  "My father's a judge," the second said in a bitter, lilting falsetto.
 "Hell. Let's go to town."
  They went on. Once they yelled at a car, but it did not stop. On the
  bridge across the railroad cutting they stopped and
 20         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 drank from a bottle. The last made to fling it over the railing. The
 second caught his arm.
  "Let me have it," he said. He broke the bottle carefully and spread the
  fragments across the road. They watched him.
  "You're not good enough to go to a college dance," the first said. "You
  poor bastard."
  "My father's a judge," the other said propping the jagged shards upright
  in the road.
 "Here comes a car," the third said.
  It had three headlights. They leaned against the railing, slanting their
  hats against the light, and watched Temple and Gowan pass. Temple's head
  was low and close. The car moved slowly.
 "You poor bastard," the first said.
  "Am IT' the second said. He took something from his pocket and flipped
  it out, whipping the sheer, faintly scented web across their faces. "Am
  IT'
 "That's what you say."
  "Doc got that step-in in Memphis," the third said. "Off a damn whore."
 "You're a lying bastard," Doc said.
  They watched the fan of light, the diminishing ruby taillamp, come to a
  stop at the Coop. The lights went off. After a while the car door
  slammed. The lights came on; the car moved away. It approached again.
  They leaned against the rail in a row, their hats slanted against the
  glare. The broken glass glinted in random sparks. The car drew up and
  stopped opposite them.
  "You gentlemen going to town?" Gowan said, opening the door. They leaned
  against the rail, then the first said, "Much obliged," gruffly and they
  got in, the two others in the rumble seat, the first beside Gowan.
  "Pull over this way," he said. "Somebody broke a bottle there."
  "Thanks," Gowan said. The car moved on. "You gentlemen going to
  Starkville tomorrow to the game?"
 The ones in the rumble seat said nothing.
 "I dont know," the first said. "I dont reckon so."
  "I'm a stranger here," Gowan said. "I ran out of liquor tonight, and I've
  got a date early in the morning. Can you gentlemen tell me where I could
  get a quart?"
  "It's mighty late," the first said. He turned to the others. "You know
  anybody he can find this time of night, Doc?"
 "Luke might," the third said.
 "Where does he live?" Gowan said.
  "Go on," the first said. "I'll show you." They crossed the square and
  drove out of town about a half mile.
            SANCTUARY            21
 "This is the road to Taylor, isn't it?" Gowan said.
 " yes, " the first said.
  "I've got to drive down there early in the morning," Gowan said. "Got to
  get there before the special does. You gentlemen not going to the game,
  you say."
  "I reckon not," the first said. "Stop here." A steep slope rose, crested
  by stunted blackjacks. "You wait here," the first said. Gowan switched
  off the lights. They could hear the other scrambling the slope.
 "Does Luke have good liquor?" Gowan said.
 "Pretty good. Good as any, I reckon," the third said.
  "If you dont like it, you dont have to drink it," Doc said. Gowan turned
  fatly and looked at him.
 "It's as good as that you had tonight," the third said.
 "You didn"t have to drink that, neither," Doc said.
  "They cant seem to make good liquor down here like they do up at school,"
  Gowan said.
 "Where you from?" the third said.
  6'Virgin-oh, -Jefferson. I went to school at Virginia. Teach you how to
  drink, there."
  The other two said nothing. The first returned, preceded by a minute
  shaling of earth down the slope. He had a fruit jar. Gowan lifted it
  against the sky. It was pale, innocent looking. He removed the cap and
  extended it.
 "Drink."
 The first took it and extended it to them in the rumble.
 "Drink."
 The third drank, but Doc refused. Gowaii drank.
  "Good God," he said, "how do you fellows drink this stuff?"
  "We dont drink rotgut at Virginia," Doc said. Gowan turned in the seat
  and looked at him.
  "Shut up, Doc," the third said. "Dont mind him," he said. "He's had a
  bellyache all night."
 :'Son bitch," Doc said.
 'Did you call me that?" Gowan said.
  "' Course he didn't," the third said. "Doc's all right. Come on Doc. Take
  a drink."
 "I dont give a damn," Doc said. "Hand it here."
  They returned to town. "The shack'll be open," the first said. "At the
  depot."
  It was a confectionery-lunchroom. It was empty save for a man in a soiled
  apron. They went to the rear and entered an alcove with a table and four
  chairs. The man brought four glasses and coca-colas. "Can I have some
  sugar and water and a lemon, Cap?" Gowan said. The man brought them. The
  others watched Gowan make a whisky sour. "They taught
 22         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 me to drink it this way," he said. They watched him drink. "Hasn't got
 much kick, to me," he said, filling his glass from the jar. He drank that.
 "You sure do drink it," the third said.
  I learned in a good school." There was a high window. Beyond it the sky
  was paler, fresher. "Have another, gentlemen," he said, filling his glass
  again. The others helped themselves moderately. "Up at school they
  consider it better to go down than to hedge," he said. They watched him
  drink that one. They saw his nostrils bead suddenly with sweat.
 "That's all for him, too," Doc said.
  "Who says so?" Gowan said. He poured an inch into the glass. "If we just
  had some decent liquor. I know a man in my county named Goodwin that
  makes-"
 "That's what they call a drink up at school," Doc said.
  Gowan looked at him. "Do you think so? Watch this." He poured into the
  glass. They watched the liquor rise.
  "Look out fellow," the third said. Gowan filled the glass level full and
  lifted it and emptied it steadily. He remembered setting the glass down
  carefully, then be became aware simultaneously of open air, of a chill
  gray freshness and an engine panting on a siding at the head of a dark
  string of cars, and that he was trying to tell someone that he had
  learned to drink like a gentleman. He was still trying to tell them, in
  a cramped dark place smelling of ammonia and cresote, vomiting into a
  receptacle, trying to tell them that he must be at Taylor at six-thirty,
  when the special arrived. The paroxysm passed; he felt extreme lassitude,
  weakness, a desire to lie down which was forcibly restrained, and in the
  flare of a match he leaned against the wall, his eyes focusing slowly
  upon a name written there in pencil. He shut one eye, propped against the
  wall, swaying and drooling, and read the name. Then he looked at them,
  wagging his head.
  "Girl name ... Name girl I know. Good girl. Good sport. Got date take her
  to Stark . . . Starkville. No chap'rone, see?" Leaning there, drooling,
  mumbling, he went to sleep.
  At once he began to fight himself out of sleep. It seemed to him that it
  was immediately, yet he was aware of time passing all the while, and that
  time was a factor in his need to wake; that otherwise he would be sorry.
  For a long while he knew that his eyes were open, waiting for vision to
  return. Then he was seeing again, without knowing at once that he was
  awake.
  He lay quite still. It seemed to him that, by breaking out of sleep, he
  had accomplished the purpose that he had waked himself for. He was lying
  in a cramped position under a low canopy, looking at the front of an
  unfamiliar building above
            SANCTUARY            23
 which small clouds rosy with sunlight drove, quite empty of any sense. Then
 his abdominal muscles completed the retch upon which he had lost
 consciousness and he heaved himself up and sprawled into the foot of the
 car, banging his head on the door. The blow fetched him completely to and he
 opened the door and half fell to the ground and dragged himself up and
 turned toward the station at a stumbling run. He fell. On hands and knees he
 looked at the empty siding and up at the sunfilled sky with unbelief and
 despair. He rose and ran on, in his stained dinner jacket, his burst collar
 and broken hair. I passed out, he thought in a kind of rage, I passed out.
 I passed out.
  The platform was deserted save for a negro with a broom. "Gret Gawd, white
  folks," he said.
  "The train," Gowan said, "the special. The one that was on that track."
  "Hit done lef. But five minutes ago." With the broom still in the arrested
  gesture of sweeping he watched Gowan turn and run back to the car and
  tumble into it.
  The jar lay on the floor. He kicked it aside and started the engine. He
  knew that he needed something on his stomach, but there wasn't time. He
  looked down at the jar. His inside coiled coldly, but he raised the jar and
  drank, guzzling, choking the stuff down, clapping a cigarette into his
  mouth to restrain the paroxysm. Almost at once he felt better.
  He crossed the square at forty miles an hour. It was sixfifteen. He took
  the Taylor road, increasing speed. He drank again from the jar without
  slowing down. When he reached Taylor the train was just pulling out of the
  station. He slammed in between two wagons as the last car passed. The
  vestibule opened; Temple sprang down and ran for a few steps beside the car
  while an official leaned down and shook his fist at her.
  Gowan had got out. She turned and came toward him, walking swiftly. Then
  she paused, stopped, came on again, staring at his wild face and hair, at
  his ruined collar and shirt.
 "You're drunk," she said. "You pig. You filthy pig."
 "Had a big night. You dont know the half of it."
  She looked about, at the bleak yellow station, the overalled men chewing
  slowly and watching her, down the track at the diminishing train, at the
  four puffs of vapor that had almost died away when the sound of the whistle
  came back. "You filthy pig," she said. "You cant go anywhere like this. You
  haven't even changed clothes." At the car she stopped again. "What's that
  behind you?"
 "My canteen," Gowan said. "Get in."
 She looked at him, her mouth boldly scarlet, her eyes watch- 24         WILLIAM FAULKNER

 ful and cold beneath her brimless hat, a curled spill of red hair. She
 looked back at the station again, stark and ugly in the fresh morning.
 "Let's get away from here." He started the car and turned it. "You'd
 better take me back to Oxford," she said. She looked back at the station.
 It now lay in shadow, in the shadow of a high scudding cloud. "You'd
 better," she said.
  At two o'clock that afternoon, running at good speed through a high
  murmurous desolation of pines, Gowan swung the car from the gravel into
  a narrow road between eroded banks descending toward a bottom of cypress
  and gum. He wore a cheap blue workshirt beneath his dinner jacket. His
  eyes were bloodshot, puffed, his jowls covered by blue stubble, and
  looking at him, braced and clinging as the car leaped and bounced in the
  worn ruts, Temple thought His whiskers have grown since we left Dumfries.
  It was hair-oil he drank. He bought a bottle of hair-oil at Dumfries and
  drank it.
  He looked at her, feeling her eyes. "Dont get your back up, now. It wont
  take a minute to run up to Goodwin's and get a bottle. It wont take ten
  minutes. I said I'd get you to Starkville before the train does, and I
  will. Dont you believe me?"
  She said nothing, thinking of the pennant-draped train already in
  Starkville; of the colorful stands; the band, the yawning glitter of the
  bass horn; the green diamond dotted with players, crouching, uttering
  short, yelping cries like marshfowl disturbed by an alligator, not
  certain of where the danger is, motionless, poised, encouraging one
  another with short meaningless cries, plaintive, wary and forlorn.
  "Trying to come over me with your innocent ways. Dont think I spent last
  night with a couple of your barber-shop jellies for nothing. Dont think
  I fed them my liquor just because I'm big-hearted. You're pretty good,
  aren't you? Think you can play around all week with any badger-trimmed
  hick that owns a Ford and fool me on Saturday, dont you? Dont think I
  didn't see your name where it's written on that lavatory wall. Dont you
  believe me?"
  She said nothing, bracing herself as the car lurched from one bank to the
  other of the cut, going too fast. He was still watching her, making no
  effort to steer it.
  "By God, I want to see the woman that can-" The road flattened into sand,
  arched completely over, walled completely by a jungle of cane and brier.
  The car lurched from side to side in the loose ruts.
  She saw the tree blocking the road, but she only braced herself anew. It
  seemed to her to be the logical and disastrous end to the train of
  circumstance in which she had become involved. She sat and watched
  rigidly and quietly as Gowan, apparently looking straight ahead, drove
  into the tree at twen-
              SANCTUARY            25
 ty miles an hour. The car struck, bounded back, then drove into the tree
 again and turned onto its side.
  She felt herself flying through the air, carrying a numbing shock upon
  her shoulder and a picture of two men peering from the fringe of cane at
  the roadside. She scrambled to her feet, her head reverted, and saw them
  step into the road, the one in a suit of tight black and a straw hat,
  smoking a cigarette, the other bareheaded, in overalls, carrying a
  shotgun, his bearded face gaped in slow astonishment. Still running her
  bones turned to water and she fell flat on her face, still running.
  Without stopping she whirled and sat up, her mouth open upon a soundless
  wail behind her lost breath. The man in overalls was still looking at
  her, his mouth open in innocent astonishment within a short soft beard.
  The other man was leaning over the upturned car, his tight coat ridged
  across his shoulders. Then the engine ceased, though the lifted front
  wbeel continued to spin idly, slowing.

                V

 TliE MAN IN OVERALLS WAS BAREFOOT ALSO. HE WALKED
 ahead of Temple and Gowan, the shotgun swinging in his hand, his splay
 feet apparently effortless in the sand into which Temple sank almost to
 the ankle at each step. From time to time he looked over his shoulder at
 them, at Gowan's bloody face and splotched clothes, at Temple struggling
 and lurching on her high heels.
  "Putty hard walkin', aint it?" he said. "Ef she'll take off them high
  heel shoes, she'll git along better."
  "Will IT' Temple said. She stopped and stood on alternate legs, holding
  to Gowan, and removed her slippers. The man watched her, looking at the
  slippers.
  "Durn ef I could git ere two of my fingers into one of them things," he
  said. "Kin I look at em?" She gave him one. He turned it slowly in his
  hand. "Durn my hide," he said. He looked at Temple again with his pale,
  empty gaze. His hair grew innocent and straw-like, bleached on the crown,
  darkening about his ears and neck in untidy curls. "She's a right tall
  gal, too," he said. "With them skinny legs of hern. How much she weigh?"
  Temple extended her hand. He returned the slipper slowly, looking at her,
  at her belly and loins. "He aint laid no crop by yit, has he?"
  "Come on," Gowan said, "let's get going. We've got to get a car and get
  back to Jefferson by night."
  When the sand ceased Temple sat down and put her slippers on. She found
  the man watching her lifted thigh and she
 26         WILLTAM FAULKNER
 jerked her skirt down and sprang up. "Well," she said, "go on. Dont you know
 the way?"
  The house came into sight, above the cedar grove beyond whose black
  interstices an apple orchard flaunted in the sunny afternoon. It was set in
  a ruined lawn, surrounded by abandoned grounds and fallen outbuildings. But
  nowhere was any sign of husbandry-plow or tool; in no direction was a
  planted field in sight-only a gaunt weather-stained ruin in a sombre grove
  through which the breeze drew with a sad, murmurous sound. Temple stopped.
  "I dont want to go there," she said. "You go on and get the car," she told
  the man. "We'll wait here."
 "He said fer y'all to come on to the house," the man said.
  "Who did?" Temple said. "Does that black man think he can tell me what to
  do?"
  "Ah, come on," Gowan said. "Let's see Goodwin and get a car. It's getting
  late. Mrs. Goodwin's here, isn't she?"
 "Hit's likely," the man said.
  "Come on," Gowan said. They went on to the house. The man mounted to the
  porch and set the shotgun just inside the door.
  "She's around somewher," he said. He looked at Temple again. "Hit aint no
  cause fer yo wife to fret," he said. "Lee'll git you to town, I reckon."
  Temple looked at him. They looked at one another soberly, like two children
  or two dogs. "What's your name?"
 "My name's Tawmmy," he said. "Hit aint no need to fret."
 The hall was open through the house. She entered.
  "Where you going?" Gowan said. "Why dont you wait out here?" She didn't
  answer. She went on down the hall. Behind her she could hear Gowan's and
  the man's voices. The back porch lay in sunlight, a segment of sunlight
  framed by the door. Beyond, she could see a weed-choked slope and a huge
  barn, broken-backed, tranquil in sunny desolation. To the right of the door
  she could see the corner either of a detached building or of a wing of the
  house. But she could hear no sound save the voices from the front.
  She went on, slowly. Then she stopped. On the square of sunlight framed by
  the door lay the shadow of a man's head, and she half spun, poised with
  running. But the shadow wore no hat, so she turned and on tiptoe she went
  to the door and peered around it. A man sat in a splint-bottom chair, in
  the sunlight, the back of his bald, white-fringed head toward her, his
  hands crossed on the head of a rough stick. She emerged onto the back
  porch.
  "Good afternoon," she said. The man did not move. She advanced again, then
  she glanced quickly over her shoulder.
            SANCTUARY            27
 With the tail of her eye she thought she had seen a thread of smoke drift
 out of the door in the detached room where the porch made an L, but it was
 gone. From a line between two posts in front of this door, three square
 cloths hung damp and limp, as though recently washed, and a woman's
 undergarment of faded pink silk. It had been washed until the lace
 resembled a ragged, fibre-like fraying of the cloth itself. It bore a
 patch of pale calico, neatly sewn. Temple looked at the old man again.
  For an instant she thought that his eyes were closed, then she believed
  that he had no eyes at all, for between the lids two objects like dirty
  yellowish clay marbles were fixed. "Gowan," she whispered, then she
  wailed "Gowan," and turned running, her head reverted, just as a voice
  spoke beyond the door where she had thought to have seen smoke:
 "He cant hear you. What do you want?"
  She whirled again and without a break in her stride and still watching
  the old man, she ran right off the porch and fetched up on hands and
  knees in a litter of ashes and tin cans and bleached bones, and saw
  Popeye watching her from the corner of the house, his hands in his
  pockets and a slanted cigarette curling across his face. Still without
  stopping she scrambled onto the porch and sprang into the kitchen, where
  a woman sat at a table, a burning cigarette in her hand, watching the
  door.

                V1

 POPEYE WENT ON AROUND THE HOUSE. GOWAN WAS LEANING over the edge of the
 porch, dabbing gingerly at his bloody nose. The barefooted man squatted
 on his heels against the wall.
  "For Christ's sake," Popeye said, "why cant you take him out back and
  wash him off? Do you want him sitting around here all day looking like
  a damn hog with its throat cut?" He snapped the cigarette into the weeds
  and sat on the top step and began to scrape his muddy shoes with a
  platinum penknife on the end of his watch chain.
 The barefoot man rose.
 "You said something about-" Gowan said.
  "Pssstl" the other said. He began to wink and frown at Gowan, jerking his
  head at Popeye's back.
  "And then you get on back down that road," Popeye said. "You hear?"
 "I thought you was fixin' to watch down ther," the man said.
  "Dont think," Popeye said, scraping at his trouser-cuffs. "You've got
  along forty years without it. You do what I told you.
 28         WILLIAM FAULKNER
  When they reached the back porch the barefoot man said: "He jest caint
  stand fer nobody-Aint he a cur'us feller, now? I be dawg ef he aint
  better'n a circus to-He wont stand fer nobody drinkin' hyer cep Lee. Wont
  drink none hisself, and jest let me take one sup and I be dawg ef hit
  dont look like he'll have a catfit."
 "He said you were forty years old," Gowan said.
 "'Taint that much," the other said.
 "How old are you? Thirty?"
  "I dont know. 'Taint as much as he said, though." The old man sat in the
  chair, in the sun. "Hit's jest Pap," the man said. The azure shadow of
  the cedars had reached the old man's feet. It was almost up to his knees.
  His hand came out and fumbled about his knees, dabbling into the shadow,
  and became still, wrist-deep in shadow. Then he rose and grasped the
  chair and, tapping ahead with the stick, he bore directly down upon them
  in a shuffling rush, so that they had to step quickly aside. He dragged
  the chair into the full sunlight and sat down again, his face lifted into
  the sun, his hands crossed on the head of the stick. "That's Pap," the
  man said. "Blind and deef both. I be dawg ef I wouldn't hate to be in a
  fix wher I couldn't tell and wouldn't even keer whut I was eatin'."
  On a plank fixed between two posts sat a galvanized pail, a tin basin,
  a cracked dish containing a lump of yellow soap. "To hell with water,"
  Gowan said. "How about that drink?"
  "Seems to me like you done already had too much. I be dawg ef you didn't
  drive that ere car straight into that tree."
 "Come on. Haven't you got some hid out somewhere?"
  "Mought be a little in the barn. But dont let him hyear us, er he'll find
  hit and po hit out." He went back to the door and peered up the hall.
  Then they left the porch and went toward the barn, crossing what had once
  been a kitchen garden choked now with cedar and blackjack saplings. Twice
  the man looked back over his shoulder. The second time he said:
 "Yon's yo wife wantin' somethin'."
 Temple stood in the kitchen door. "Gowan," she called.
  "Wave yo hand er somethin'," the man said. "Ef she don't hush, he's goin'
  to hyear us." Gowan flapped his hand. They went on and entered the barn.
  Beside the entrance a crude ladder mounted. "Better wait twell I git up,"
  the man said. "Hit's putty rotten; mought not hold us both."
 "Why dont you fix it, then? Dont you use it every day?"
  "Hit's helt all right, so fur," the other said. He mounted. Then Gowan
  followed, through the trap, into yellow-barred gloom where the level sun
  fell through the broken walls and roof. "Walk wher I do," the man said.
  "You'll tromp on a loose boa'd and find yoself downstairs befo you know
  hit." He
            SANCTUARY            29
 picked his way across the floor and dug an earthenware jug from a pile of
 rotting hay in the corner. "One place he wont look fer hit," he said.
 "Skeered of sp'ilin them gal's hands of hisn."
  They drank. "I've see you out hyer befo," the man said. "Caint call yo
  name, though."
  "MY name's Stevens. I've been buying liquor from Lee for three years.
  When'll he be back? We've got to get on to town."
  "He'll he hyer soon. I've seen you befo. Nother feller furn Jefferson out
  hyer three-fo nights ago. I cant call his name neither. He sho was a
  talker, now. Kep on tellin' how he up and quit his wife. Have some mo," he
  said; then he ceased and squatted slowly, the jug in his lifted hands, his
  head bent with listening. After a moment the voice spoke again, from the
  hallway beneath.
 "Jack.,,
  The man looked at Gowan. His jaw dropped into an expression of imbecile
  glee. What teeth he had were stained and ragged within his soft, tawny
  beard.
 "You. Jack, up there," the voice said.
  "Hyear him?" the man whispered, shaking with silent glee. "Callin' me Jack.
  My name's Tawmmy."
 "Come on," the voice said. "I know you're there."
  "I reckon we better," Tommy said. "He jes lief take a shot up through the
  flo as not."
  "For Christ's sake," Gowan said, "Why didn't you-Here," he shouted, "here
  we come!"
  Popeye stood in the door, his forefingers in his vest. The sun had set.
  When they descended and appeared in the door Temple stepped from the back
  porch. She paused, watching them, then she came down the hill. She began to
  run.
 "Didn't I tell you get down on that road?" Popeye said.
  "Me and him jest stepped down hyer a minute," Tommy said.
 "Did I tell you to get on down that road, or didn't IT'
  "Yeuh," Tommy said. "You told me." Popeye turned without so much as a
  glance at Gowan. Tommy followed. His back still shook with secret glee.
  Temple met Popeye halfway to the house. Without ceasing to run she appeared
  to pause. Even her flapping coat did not overtake her, yet for an ap-
  preciable instant she faced Popeye with a grimace of taut, toothed
  coquetry. He did not stop; the finicking swagger of his narrow back did not
  falter. Temple ran again. She passed Tommy and clutched Gowan's arm.
  "Gowan, I'm scared. She said for me not to-You've been drinking again; you
  haven't even washed the blood-She says for us to go away from here . . ."
  Her eyes were quite black,
 30         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 her face small and wan in the dusk. She looked toward the house. Popeye
 was just turning the corner. "She has to walk all the way to a spring for
 water; she- They've got the cutest little baby in a box behind the stove.
 Gowan, she said for me not to be here after dark. She said to ask him.
 He's got a car. She said she didn't think he-"
  "Ask who?" Gowan said. Tommy was looking back at them. Then he went on.
  "That black man. She said she didn't think he would, but he might. Come
  on." They went toward the house. A path led around it to the front. The
  car was parked between the path and the house, in the tall weeds. Temple
  faced Gowan again, her hand lying upon the door of the car. "It wont take
  him any time, in this. I know a boy at home has one. It will run eighty.
  All he would have to do is just drive us to a town, because she said if
  we were married and I had to say we were. Just to a railroad. Maybe
  there's one closer than Jefferson," she whispered, staring at him,
  stroking her hand along the edge of the door.
  "Oh," Gowan said, "I'm to do the asking. Is that it? You're all nuts. Do
  you think that ape will? I'd rather stay here a week than go anywhere
  with him."
 "She said to. She said for me not to stay here."
 "You're crazy as a loon. Come on here."
 "You wont ask him? You wont do it?"
 "No. Wait till Lee comes, I tell you. He'll get us a car."
  They went on in the path. Popeye was leaning against a post, fighting a
  cigarette. Temple ran on up the broken steps. "Say," she said, "dont you
  want to drive us to town?"
  He turned his head, the cigarette in his mouth, the match cupped between
  his hands. Temple's mouth was fixed in that cringing grimace. Popeye
  leaned the cigarette to the match. "No," he said.
  "Come on," Temple said. "Be a sport. It wont take you any time in that
  Packard. How about it? We'll pay you."
  Popeye inhaled. He snapped the match into the weeds. He said, in his
  soft, cold voice: "Make your whore lay off of me, Jack."
  Gowan moved thickly, like a clumsy, good-tempered horse goaded suddenly.
  "Look here, now," he said. Popeye exhaled, the smoke jetting downward in
  two thin spurts. "I don't like that," Gowan said. "Do you know who you're
  talking to?" He continued that thick movement, like he could neither stop
  it nor complete it. "I dont like that." Popeye turned his head and looked
  at Gowan. Then he quit looking at him and Temple said suddenly:
 "What river did you fall in and with that suit on? Do you
            SANCTUARY            31

 have to shave it off at night?" Then she was moving toward the door with
 Gowan's hand in the small of her back, her head reverted, her heels
 clattering. Popeye leaned motionless against the post, his head turned over
 his shoulder in profile.
 "Do you want-" Gowan hissed.
  "You mean old thing!" Temple cried. "You mean old thing!"
  Gowan shoved her into the house. "Do you want him to slam your damn head
  off?" he said.
 "You're scared of him!" Temple said. "You're scared!"
  "Shut your mouth!" Gowan said. He began to shake her. Their feet scraped on
  the bare floor as though they were performing a clumsy dance, and clinging
  together they lurched into the wall. "Look out," he said, "you're getting
  all that stuff stirred up in me again." She broke free, running. He leaned
  against the wall and watched her in silhouette run out the back door.
  She ran into the kitchen. It was dark save for a crack of light about the
  fire-door of the stove. She whirled and ran out the door and saw Gowan
  going down the hill toward the barn. He's going to drink some more, she
  thought; he's getting drunk again. That makes three times today. Still more
  dusk had grown in the hall. She stood on tiptoe, listening, thinking I'm
  hungry. I haven't eaten all day; thinking of the school, the lighted
  windows, the slow couples strolling toward the sound of the supper bell,
  and of her father sitting on the porch at home, his feet on the rail,
  watching a negro mow the lawn. She moved quietly on tiptoe. In the corner
  beside the door the shotgun leaned and she crowded into the corner beside
  it and began to cry.
  Immediately she stopped and ceased breathing. Something was moving beyond
  the wall against which she leaned. It crossed the room with minute,
  blundering sounds, preceded by a dry tapping. It emerged into the hall and
  she screamed, feeling her lungs emptying long after all the air was
  expelled, and her diaphragm laboring long after her chest was empty, and
  watched the old man go down the hall at a wide-legged shuffling trot, the
  stick in one hand and the other elbow cocked at an acute angle from his
  middle. Running, she passed hima dim spraddled figure standing at the edge
  of the porch-and ran on into the kitchen and darted into the corner behind
  the stove. Crouching, she drew the box out and drew it before her. Her hand
  touched the child's face, then she flung her arms around the box, clutching
  it, staring across it at the pale door and trying to pray. But she could
  not think of a single designation for the heavenly father, so she began to
  say "My father's a judge; my father's a judge" over and over until Goodwin
 32         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 ran lightly into the room. He struck a match and held it overhead ana looked
 down at her until the flame reached his fingers.
  "Hah," he said. She heard his light, swift feet twice, then his hand
  touched her cheek and he lifted her from behind the box by the scruff of
  the neck, like a kitten. "What are you doing in my house?" he said.

                Vii

 FROM SOMEWHERE BEYOND THE LAMPLIT HALL SHE COULD hear the voices-a word; now
 and then a laugh: the harsh, derisive laugh of a man easily brought to mirth
 by youth or by age, cutting across the spluttering of frying meat on the
 stove where the woman stood. Once she heard two of them come down the hall
 in their heavy shoes, and a moment later the clatter of the dipper in the
 galvanized pail and the voice that had laughed, cursing. Holding her coat
 close she peered around the door with the wide, abashed curiosity of a
 child, and saw Gowan and a second man in khaki breeches. He's getting drunk
 again, she thought. He's got drunk four times since we left Taylor.
 "Is he your brother?" she said.
  "Who?" the woman said. "My what?" she turned the meat on the hissing
  skillet.
 "I thought maybe your young brother was here."
  "God," the woman said. She turned the meat with a wire fork. "I hope not."
  "Where is your brother?" Temple said, peering around the door. "I've got
  four brothers. Two are lawyers and one's a newspaper man. The other's still
  in school. At Yale. My father's a judge. Judge Drake of Jackson." She
  thought of her father sitting on the veranda, in a linen suit, a palm leaf
  fan in his hand, watching the negro mow the lawn.
  The woman opened the oven and looked in. "Nobody asked you to come out
  here. I didn't ask you to stay. I told you to go while it was daylight."
  "How could I? I asked him. Gowan wouldn't, so I had to ask him."
  The woman closed the oven and turned and looked at Temple, her back to the
  light. "How could you? Do you know how I get my water? I walk after it. A
  mile. Six times a day. Add that up. Not because I am somewhere I am afraid
  to stay." She went to the table and took up a pack of cigarettes and shook
  one out.
  "May I have one?" Temple said. The woman flipped the pack along the table.
  She removed the chimney from the
            SANCTUARY            33
 lamp and lit hers at the wick. Temple took up the pack and stood listening
 to Gowan and the other man go back into the house. "There are so many of
 them," she said in a wailing tone, watching the cigarette crush slowly in
 her fingers. "But maybe, with so many of them . . ." The woman had gone back
 to the stove. She turned the meat. "Gowan kept on getting drunk again. He
 got drunk three times today. He was drunk when I got off the train at Taylor
 and I am on probation and I told him what would happen and I tried to get
 him to throw the jar away and when we stopped at that little country store
 to buy a shirt he got drunk again. And so we hadn't eaten and we stopped at
 Dumfries and he went into the restaurant but I was too worried to eat and I
 couldn't find him and then he came up another street and I felt the bottle
 in his pocket before he knocked my hand away. He kept on saying I had his
 lighter and then when he lost it and I told him he had, he swore he never
 owned one in his life."
  The meat hissed and spluttered in the skillet. "He got drunk three separate
  time," Temple said. "Three separate times in one day. Buddy-that's Hubert,
  my youngest brother -said that if he ever caught me with a drunk man, he'd
  beat hell out of me. And now I'm with one that gets drunk three times in
  one day." Leaning her hip against the table, her hand crushing the
  cigarette, she began to laugh. "Dont you think that's funny?" she said.
  Then she quit laughing by holding her breath, and she could hear the faint
  guttering the lamp made, and the meat in the skillet and the hissing of the
  kettle on the stove, and the voices, the harsh, abrupt, meaningless
  masculine sounds from the house. "And you have to cook for all of them
  every night. All those men eating here, the house full of them at night, in
  the dark . . ." She dropped the crushed cigarette. "May I hold the baby? I
  know how; I'll hold him good." She ran to the box, stooping, and lifted the
  sleeping child. It opened its eyes, whimpering. "Now, now; Temple's got
  it." She rocked it, held high and awkward in her thin arms. "Listen," she
  said, looking at the woman's back, "will you ask him? your husband, I mean.
  He can get a car and take me somewhere. Will you? Will you ask him?" The
  child had stopped whimpering. Its lead-colored eyelids showed a thin line
  of eyeball. "I'm not afraid," Temple said. "Things like that dont happen.
  Do they? They're just like other people. You're just like other people.
  With a little baby. And besides, my father's a ju-judge. The gu-governor
  comes to our house to e-eat-What a cute little bu-ba-a-by," she wailed,
  lifting the child to her face; "if bad mans hurts Temple, us'll tell the
  governor's soldiers, won't us?"
 "Like what people?" the woman said, turning the meat.
 34         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 "Do you think Lee hasn't anything better to do than chase after every one
 of you cheap little-" She opened the fire door and threw her cigarette in
 and slammed the door. In nuzzling at the child Temple had pushed her hat
 onto the back of her head at a precarious dissolute angle above her
 clotted curls. "Why did you come here?"
  "It was Gowan. I begged him. We had already missed the ball game, but I
  begged him if he'd just get me to Starkville before the special started
  back, they wouldn't know I wasn't on it, because the ones that saw me get
  off wouldn't tell. But he wouldn't. He said we'd stop here just a minute
  and get some more whisky and he was already drunk then. He had gotten
  drunk again since we left Taylor and I'm on probation and Daddy would
  just die. But he wouldn't do it. He got drunk again while I was begging
  him to take me to a town anywhere and let me out."
 "On probation?" the woman said.
  "For slipping out at night. Because only town boys can have cars, and
  when you had a date with a town boy on Friday or Saturday or Sunday, the
  boys in school wouldn't have a date with you, because they cant have
  cars. So I had to slip out. And a girl that didn't like me told the Dean,
  because I had a date with a boy she liked and he never asked her for
  another date. So I had to."
  "If you didn't slip out, you wouldn't get to go riding," the woman said.
  "Is that it? And now when you slipped out once too often, you're
  squealing."
  "Gowan's not a town boy. He's from Jefferson. He went to Virginia. He
  kept on saying how they had taught him to drink like a gentleman, and I
  begged him just to let me out anywhere and lend me enough money for a
  ticket because I only had two dollars, but he-"
  "Oh, I know your sort," the woman said. "Honest women. Too good to have
  anything to do with common people. You'll slip out at night with the
  kids, but just let a man come along." She turned the meat. "Take all you
  can get, and give nothing. 'I'm a pure girl; I dont do that.' You'll slip
  out with the kids and bum their gasoline and eat their food, but just let
  a man so much as look at you and you faint away because your father's the
  judge and your four brothers might not like it. But just let you get into
  a jam, then who do you come crying to? to us, the ones that are not good
  enough to lace the judge's almighty shoes." Across the child Temple gazed
  at the woman's back, her face like a small pale mask beneath the pre-
  carious hat.
  "My brother said he would kill Frank. He didn't say he would give me a
  whipping if he caught me with him; he said
            SANCTUARY            35
 he would kill the goddam son of a bitch in his yellow buggy and my father
 cursed my brother and said he could run his family a while longer and he
 drove me into the house and locked me in and went down to the bridge to
 wait for Frank. But I wasn't a coward. I climbed down the gutter and
 headed Frank off and told him. I begged him to go away, but he said we'd
 both go. When we got back in the buggy I knew it had been the last time.
 I knew it, and I begged him again to go away, but he said he'd drive me
 home to get my suitcase and we'd tell father. He wasn't a coward either.
 My father was sitting on the porch. He said 'Get out of that buggy' and
 I got out and I bekged Frank to go on, but he got out too and we came up
 the path and father reached around inside the door and got the shotgun.
 I got in front of Frank and father said 'Do you want it tooT and I tried
 to stay in front but Frank shoved me behind him and held me and father
 shot him and said 'Get down there and sup your dirt, you whore.'
  "I have been called that," Temple whispered, holding the sleeping child
  in her high thin arms, gazing at the woman's back.
  "But you good women. Cheap sports. Giving nothing, then when you're
  caught . . . Do you know what you've got into now?" she looked across her
  shoulder, the fork in her hand. "Do you think you're meeting kids now?
  kids that give a d n whether you like it or not? Let me tell you whose
  house you've come into without being asked or wanted; who you're expect-
  ing to drop everything and carry you back where you had no business ever
  leaving. When he was a soldier in the Philippines he killed another
  soldier over one of those nigger women and they sent him to Leavenworth.
  Then the war came and they let him out to go to it. He got two medals,
  and when it was over they put him back in Leavenworth until the lawyer
  got a congressman to get him out. Then I could quit jazzing again---~'
  "Jazzing?" Temple whispered, holding the child, looking herself no more
  than an elongated and leggy infant in her scant dress and uptilted hat.
  "Yes, putty face!" the woman said. "How do you suppose I paid that
  lawyer? And that's the sort of man you think will care that much-" with
  the fork in her hand she came and snapped her fingers softly and
  viciously in Temple's face "-what happens to you. And you, you little
  doll-faced slut, that think you cant come into a room where a man is
  without him . . ." Beneath the faded garment her breast moved deep and
  full. With her hands on her hips she looked at Temple with cold, blazing
  eyes. "Man? You've never seen a real man. You dont know what it is to be
  wanted by a real man.
 36         WILLIAM FAULKNER

 And thank your stars you haven't and never will, for then you'd find just
 what that little putty face is worth, and all the rest of it you think you
 are jealous of when you're just scared of it. And if he is just man enough
 to call you whore, you'll say Yes Yes and you'll crawl naked in the dirt and
 the mire for him to call you that. . . . Give me that baby." Temple held the
 child, gazing at the woman, her mouth moving as if she were saying Yes Yes
 Yes. The woman threw the fork onto the table. "Turn loose," she said,
 lifting the child. It opened its eyes and wailed. The woman drew a chair out
 and sat down, the child upon her lap. "Will you hand me one of those diapers
 on the line yonder?" she said. Temple stood on the floor, her lips still
 moving. "You're scared to go out there, aren't you?" the woman said. She
 rose.
 "No," Temple said; "I'll get-"
  "I'll get it." The unlaced brogans scuffed across the kitchen. She returned
  and drew another chair up to the stove and spread the two remaining cloths
  and the undergarments on it, and sat again and laid the child across her
  lap. It wailed. "Hush," she said, "hush, now," her face in the lamplight
  taking a serene, brooding quality. She changed the child and laid it in the
  box. Then she took a platter down from a cupboard curtained by a split
  towsack and took up the fork and came and looked into Temple's face again.
  "Listen. If I get a car for you, will you get out of here?" she said.
  Staring at her Temple moved her mouth as though she were experimenting with
  words, tasting them. "Will you go out the back and get into it and go away
  and never come back here?"
 "Yes," Temple whispered, "anywhere. Anything."
  Without seeming to move her cold eyes at all the woman looked Temple up and
  down. Temple could feel all her muscles shrinking like severed vines in the
  noon sun. "You poor little gutless fool," the woman said in her cold
  undertone. "Playing at it."
 "I didn't. I didn't."
  "You'll have something to tell them now, when you get back. Wont you?" Face
  to face, their voices were like shadows upon too close blank walls.
  "Playing at it."
 "Anything. Just so I get away. Anywhere."
  "It's not Lee I'm afraid of. Do you think he plays the dog after every hot
  little bitch that comes along? It's you."
 "Yes, I'll go anywhere."
  "I know your sort. I've seen them. All running, but not too fast. Not so
  fast you cant tell a real man when you see him. Do you think you've got the
  only one in the world?"
 "Gowan," Temple whispered, "Gowan."
            SANCTUARY            37
  "I have slaved for that man," the woman whispered, her lips scarce
  moving, in her still, dispassionate voice. It was as though she were
  reciting a formula for bread. "I worked night shift as a waitress so I
  could see him Sundays at the prison. I lived two years in a single room,
  cooking over a gas-jet, because I promised him. I lied to him and made
  money to get him out of prison, and when I told him how I made it, he
  beat me. And now you must come here where you're not wanted. Nobody asked
  you to come here. Nobody cares whether you are afraid or not. Afraid? You
  haven't the guts to be really afraid, anymore than you have to be in
  love."
  "I'll pay you," Temple whispered. "Anything you say. My father will give
  it to me." The woman watched her, her face motionless, as rigid as when
  she had been speaking. "I'll send you clothes. I have a new fur coat. I
  just wore it since Christmas. It's as good as new."
  The woman laughed. Her mouth laughed, with no sound, no movement of her
  face. "Clothes? I had three fur coats once. I gave one of them to a woman
  in an alley by a saloon. Clothes? God." She turned suddenly. "I'll get
  a car. You get away from here and dont you ever come back. Do you hear?"
  "Yes," Temple whispered. Motionless, pale, like a sleepwalker she watched
  the woman transfer the meat to the platter and pour the gravy over it.
  From the oven she took a pan of biscuits and put them on a plate. "Can
  I help you?" Temple whispered. The woman said nothing. She took up the
  two plates and went out. Temple went to the table and took a cigarette
  from the pack and stood staring stupidly at the lamp. One side of the
  chimney was blackened. Across it a crack ran in a thin silver curve. She
  lit hers at the lamp, someway, Temple thought, holding the cigarette in
  her hand, staring at the uneven flame. The woman returned. She caught up
  the corner of her skirt and lifted the smutty coffee-pot from the stove.
 "Can I take that?" Temple said.
 "No. Come on and get your supper." She went out.
  Temple stood at the table, the cigarette in her hand. The shadow of the
  stove fell upon the box where the child lay. Upon the lumpy wad of
  bedding it could be distinguished only by a series of pale shadows in
  soft small curves, and she went and stood over the box and looked down
  at its putty-colored face and bluish eyelids. A thin whisper of shadow
  cupped its head and lay moist upon its brow; one thin arm, upflung, lay
  curl-palmed beside its cheek. Temple stooped above the box.
  "He's going to die," Temple whispered. Bending, her shadow loomed high
  upon the wall, her coat shapeless, her hat tilted monstrously above a
  monstrous escaping of hair. "Poor little baby," she whispered, "poor
  little baby." The men's
 38         WILLIAM FAULKNER

 voices grew louder. She heard a trampling of feet in the hall, a rasping
 of chairs, the voice of the man who had laughed above them, laughing
 again. She turned, motionless again, watching the door. The woman entered.
 "Go and eat your supper," she said.
  "The car," Temple said. "I could go now, while they're eating."
  "What car?" the woman said. "Go on and eat. Nobody's going to hurt you."
  "I'm not hungry. I haven't eaten today. I'm not hungry at all."
 "Go and eat your supper," she said.
 "I'll wait and eat when you do."
  "Go on and eat your supper. I've got to get done here some time tonight."

               Vill

 TEMPLE ENTERED THE DINING-ROOM FROM THE KITCHEN, HER face fixed in a
 cringing, placative expression; she was quite blind when she entered,
 holding her coat about her, her hat thrust upward and back at that
 dissolute angle. After a moment she saw Tommy. She went straight toward
 him, as if she had been looking for him all the while. Something
 intervened: a hard forearm; she attempted to evade it, looking at Tommy.
 "Here," Gowan said across the table, his chair rasping back, you come
 around here."
  "Outside, brother," the one who had stopped her said, whom she recognised
  then as the one who had laughed so often; "you're drunk. Come here, kid."
  His hard forearm came across her middle. She thrust against it, grinning
  rigidly at Tommy. "Move down, Tommy," the man said. "Ain't you got no
  manners, you mat-faced bastard?" Tommy guffawed, scraping his chair along
  the floor. The man drew her toward him by the wrist. Across the table
  Gowan stood up, propping himself on the table. She began to resist,
  grinning at Tommy, picking at the man's fingers.
 "Quit that, Van," Goodwin said.
 "Right on my lap here," Van said.
 "Let her go," Goodwin said.
 "Who'll make me?" Van said. "Who's big enough?"
  "Let her go," Goodwin said. Then she was free. She began to back slowly
  away. Behind her the woman, entering with a dish, stepped aside. Still
  smiling her aching, rigid grimace, Temple backed from the room. In the
  hall she whirled and ran. She ran right off the porch, into the weeds and
  sped on. She ran to the road and down it for fifty yards in the darkness,
            SANCTUARY            39
 then without a break she whirled and ran back to the house and sprang onto
 the porch and crouched against the door just as someone came up the hall.
 It was Tommy.
  "Oh, hyer you are," he said. He thrust something awkwardly at her.
  "Hyer," he said.
 "What is it?" she whispered.
 "Little bite of victuals. I bet you aint et since mawnin'."
 "No. Not then, even," she whispered.
  "You eat a little mite and you'll feel better," he said, poking the plate
  at her. "You set down hyer and eat a little bite wher wont nobody bother
  you. Durn them fellers."
  Temple leaned around the door, past his dim shape, her face wan as a
  small ghost in the refracted light from the dining-room. "Mrs.-Mrs. . .
  ." she whispered.
  "She's in the kitchen. Want me to go back there with you?" In the
  dining-room a chair scraped. Between blinks Tommy saw Temple in the path,
  her body slender and motionless for a moment as though waiting for some
  laggard part to catch up. Then she was gone like a shadow around the
  corner of the house. He stood in the door, the plate of food in his hand.
  Then he turned his head and looked down the hall just in time to see her
  flit across the darkness toward the kitchen. "Durn them fellers."
  He was standing there when the others returned to the porch.
  "He's got a plate of grub," Van said. "He's trying to get his with a
  plate full of ham."
 "Git my whut?" Tommy said.
 "Look here," Gowan said.
  Van struck the plate from Tommy's hand. He turned to Gowan. "Dont you
  like it?"
 "No," Gowan said, "I dont."
 "What are you going to do about it?" Van said.
 "Van," Goodwin said.
 "Do you think you're big enough to not like it?" Van said.
 "I am," Goodwin said.
  When Van went back to the kitchen Tommy followed him. He stopped at the
  door and heard Van in the kitchen.
 "Come for a walk, little bit," Van said.
 "Get out of here, Van," the woman said.
  "Come for a little walk," Van said. "I'm a good guy. Ruby'll tell you."
  "Get out of here, now," the woman said. "Do you want me to call Lee?" Van
  stood against the light, in a khaki shirt and breeches, a cigarette
  behind his ear against the smooth sweep of his blond hair. Beyond him
  Temple stood behind the chair
 40         WILLIAM FAULKNER

 in which the woman sat at the table, her mouth open a little, her eyes
 quite black.
  When Tommy went back to the porch with the jug he said to Goodwin~ "Why
  don't them tellers quit pesterin' that gal?"
 "Who's pestering her?"
 "Van is. She's skeered. Whyn't they leave her be?"
 "It's none of your business. You keep out of it. You hear?"
  "Them fellers ought to quit pesterin' her," Tommy said. He squatted
  against the wall. They were drinking, passing the jug back and forth,
  talking. With the top of his mind he listened to them, to Van's gross and
  stupid tales of city life with rapt interest, guffawing now and then,
  drinking in his turn. Van and Gowan were doing the talking, and Tommy
  listened to them. "Them two's fixin' to have hit out with one another,"
  he whispered to Goodwin in a chair beside him. "Hyear 'em?" They were
  talking quite loud; Goodwin moved swiftly and lightly from his chair, his
  feet striking the floor with light thuds; Tommy saw Van standing and
  Gowan holding himself erect by the back of his chair.
 "I never meant-" Van said.
 "Dont say it then," Goodwin said.
  Gowan said something. That durn feller, Tommy thought. Cant even talk no
  more.
 "Shut up, you," Goodwin said.
  "Think talk 'bout my-" Gowan said. He moved, swayed against the chair.
  It fell over. Gowan blundered into the wall.
 "By God, I'll-" Van said.
  11-ginia gentleman; I don't give a-" Gowan said. Goodwin flung him aside
  with a backhanded blow of his arm, and grasped Van. Gowan fell against
  the wall.
 I . I When I say sit down, I mean it," Goodwin said.
  After that they were quiet for a while. Goodwin returned to his chair.
  They began to talk again, passing the jug, and Tommy listened. But soon
  he began to think about Temple again. He could feel his feet scouring on
  the floor and his whole body writhing in an acute discomfort. "They ought
  to let that gal alone," he whispered to Goodwin. "They ought to quit
  pesterin' her."
  "It's none of your business," Goodwin said. "Let every damned one of them
  . . ."
 "They ought to quit pesterin' her."
  Popeye came out the door. He lit a cigarette. Tommy watched his face
  flare out between his hands, his cheeks sucking; he followed with his
  eyes the small comet of the match into the weeds. Him too, he said. Two
  of 'em; his body writhing slowly. Pore little crittur. I be dawg ef I
  aint a mind to go down to the barn and stay there, I be dawg ef I aint.
  He
            SANCTUARY             41
 rose, his feet making no sound on the porch. He stepped down into the path
 and went around the house. There was a light in the window there. Dont
 nobody never use in there, he said, stopping, then he said, That's where
 she'll be stayin', and he went to the window and looked in. The sash was
 down. Across a missing pane a sheet of rusted tin was nailed.
  Temple was sitting on the bed, her legs tucked under her, erect, her
  hands lying in her lap, her hat tilted on the back of her head. She
  looked quite small, her very attitude an outrage to muscle and tissue of
  more than seventeen and more compatible with eight or ten, her elbows
  close to her sides, her face turned toward the door against which a chair
  was wedged. There was nothing in the room save the bed, with its faded
  patchwork quilt, and the chair. The walls had been plastered once, but
  the plaster had cracked and fallen in places, exposing the lathing and
  molded shreds of cloth. On the wall hung a raincoat and a khaki-covered
  canteen.
  Temple's head began to move. It turned slowly, as if she were following
  the passage of someone beyond the wall. It turned on to an excruciating
  degree, though no other muscle moved, like one of those papier-mfich6
  Easter toys filled with candy, and became motionless in that reverted
  position. Then it turned back, slowly, as though pacing invisible feet
  beyond the wall, back to the chair against the door and became motionless
  there for a moment. Then she faced forward and Tommy watched her take a
  tiny watch from the top of her stocking and look at it. With the watch
  in her hand she lifted her head and looked directly at him, her eyes calm
  and empty as two holes. After a while she looked down at the watch again
  and returned it to her stocking.
  She rose from the bed and removed her coat and stood motionless,
  arrowlike in her scant dress, her head bent, her hands clasped before
  her. She sat on the bed again. She sat with her legs close together, her
  head bent. She raised her head and looked about the room. Tommy could
  hear the voices from the dark porch. They rose again, then sank to the
  steady murmur.
  Temple sprang to her feet. She unfastened her dress, her arms arched thin
  and high, her shadow anticking her movements. In a single motion she was
  out of it, crouching a little, match-thin in her scant undergarments. Her
  head emerged facing the chair against the door. She hurled the dress
  away, her hand reaching for the coat. She scrabbled it up and swept it
  about her, pawing at the sleeves. Then, the coat clutched to her breast,
  she whirled and looked straight into Tommy's eyes and whirled and ran and
  flung herself upon the chair. "Durn them fellers," Tommy whispered, "durn
  them fellers."
 42         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 He could hear them on the front porch and his body began to writhe slowly in
 an acute unhappiness. "Durn them fellers."
  When he looked into the room again Temple was moving toward him, holding
  the coat about her. She took the raincoat from the nail and put it on over
  her own coat and fastened it. She lifted the canteen down and returned to
  the bed. She laid the canteen on the bed and picked her dress up from the
  floor and brushed it with her hand and folded it carefully and laid it on
  the bed. Then she turned back the quilt, exposing the mattress. There was
  no linen, no pillow, and when she touched the mattress it gave forth a
  faint dry whisper of shucks.
  She removed her slippers and set them on the bed and got in beneath the
  quilt. Tommy could hear the mattress crackle. She didn't lie down at once.
  She sat upright, quite still, the hat tilted rakishly upon the back of her
  head. Then she moved the canteen, the dress and the slippers beside her
  head and drew the raincoat about her legs and lay down, drawing the quilt
  up, then she sat up and removed the hat and shook her hair out and laid the
  hat with the other garments and prepared to lie down again. Again she
  paused. She opened the raincoat and produced a compact from somewhere and,
  watching her motions in the tiny mirror, she spread and fluffed her hair
  with her fingers and powdered her face and replaced the compact and looked
  at the watch again and fastened the raincoat. She moved the garments one by
  one under the quilt and lay down and drew the quilt to her chin. The voices
  had got quiet for a moment and in the silence Tommy could hear a faint,
  steady chatter of the shucks inside the mattress where Temple lay, her
  hands crossed on her breast and her legs straight and close and decorous,
  like an effigy on an ancient tomb.
  The voices were still; he had completely forgot them until he heard Goodwin
  say "Stop it. Stop that!" A chair crashed over; he heard Goodwin's light
  thudding feet; the chair clattered along the porch as though it had been
  kicked aside, and crouching, his elbows out a little in squat, bear-Ue
  alertness, Tommy heard dry, light sounds like billiard balls. "Tommy,"
  Goodwin said.
  When necessary he could move with that thick, lightninglike celerity of
  badgers or coons. He was around the house and on the porch in time to see
  Gowan slam into the wall and slump along it and plunge full length off the
  porch into the weeds, and Popeye in the door, his head thrust forward.
  "Grab him there!" Goodwin said. Tommy sprang upon Popeye in a sidling rush.
            SANCTUARY '          43
  "I got-hah!" he said as Popeye slashed savagely at his face; "you would,
  would you? Hole up hyer."
  Popeye ceased. "Jesus Christ. You let them sit around here all night,
  swilling that goddarn stuff; I told you. Jesus Christ."
  Goodwin and Van were a single shadow, locked and hushed and furious. "Let
  go!" Van shouted. "I'll kill . . ." Tommy sprang to them. They jammed Van
  against the wall and held him motionless.
 "Got him?" Goodwin said.
 "Yeuh. I got him. Hole up hyer. You done whupped him."
 "By God, I'll-"
  "Now, now; whut you want to kill him fer? You caint eat him, kin you? You
  want Mr. Popeye to start guttin' us all with that ere artermatic?"
  Then it was over, gone like a furious gust of black wind, leaving a
  peaceful vacuum in which they moved quietly about, lifting Gowan out of the
  weeds with low-spoken, amicable directions to one another. They carried him
  into the hall, where the woman stood, and to the door of the room where
  Temple was.
  "She's locked it," Van said. He struck the door, high. "Open the door," he
  shouted. "We're bringing you a customer."
 "Hush," Goodwin said. "There's no lock on it. Push it."
  "Sure," Van said; "I'll push it." He kicked it. The chair buckled and
  sprang into the room. Van banged the door open and they entered, carrying
  Gowan's legs. Van kicked the chair across the room. Then he saw Temple
  standing in the corner behind the bed. His hair was broken about his face,
  long as a girl's. He flung it back with a toss of his head. His chin was
  bloody and he deliberately spat blood onto the floor.
  "Go on," Goodwin said, carrying Gowan's shoulders, "put him on the bed."
  They swung Gowan onto the bed. His bloody head lolled over the edge. Van
  jerked him over and slammed him onto the mattress. He groaned, lifting his
  hand. Van struck him across the face with his palm.
 "Lie still, you-"
  "Let be," Goodwin said. He caught Van's hand. For an instant they glared at
  one another.
 "I said, Let be," Goodwin said. "Get out of here."
  "Got proteck . . ." Gowan mutteredgirl. 'Ginia gem
 . . . gernman got proteck . - ."
 "Get out of here, now," Goodwin said.
 The woman stood in the door beside Tommy, her back
 44         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 against the door frame. Beneath a cheap coat her night-dress dropped to her
 feet.
  Van lifted Temple's dress from the bed. "Van," Goodwin said. "I said get
  out."
  "I heard you," Van said. He shook the dress out. Then he looked at Temple
  in the corner, her arms crossed, her hands clutching her shoulders. Goodwin
  moved toward Van. He dropped the dress and went around the bed. Popeye came
  in the door, a cigarette in his fingers. Beside the woman Tommy drew his
  breath hissing through his ragged teeth.
  He saw Van take hold of the raincoat upon Temple's breast and rip it open.
  Then Goodwin sprang between them; he saw Van duck, whirling, and Temple
  fumbling at the torn raincoat. Van and Goodwin were now in the middle of
  the floor, swinging at one another, then he was watching Popeye walking
  toward Temple. With the corner of his eye he saw Van lying on the floor and
  Goodwin standing over him, stooped a little, watching Popeye's back.
  "Popeye," Goodwin said. Popeye went on, the cigarette trailing back over
  his shoulder, his head turned a little as though he were not looking where
  he was going, the cigarette slanted as though his mouth were somewhere
  under the turn of his jaw. "Don't touch her," Goodwin said.
  Popeye stopped before Temple, his face turned a little aside. His right
  hand lay in his coat pocket. Beneath the raincoat on Temple's breast Tommy
  could see the movement of the other hand, communicating a shadow of
  movement to the coat.
 "Take your hand away," Goodwin said. "Move it."
  Popeye moved his hand. He turned, his hands in his coat pockets, looking at
  Goodwin. He crossed the room, watching Goodwin. Then he turned his back on
  him and went out the door.
  "Here, Tommy," Goodwin said quietly, "grab hold of this." They lifted Van
  and carried him out. The woman stepped aside. She leaned against the wall,
  holding her coat together. Across the room Temple stood crouched into the
  comer, fumbling at the torn raincoat. Gowan began to snore.
  Goodwin returned. "You'd better go back to bed," he said. The woman didn't
  move. He put his hand on her shoulder. "Ruby. 11
  "While you finish the trick Van started and you wouldn't let him finish?
  You poor fool. You poor fool."
  "Come on, now," he said, his hand on her shoulder. "Go back to bed."
  "But dont come back. Dont bother to come back. I wont be there. You owe me
  nothing. Dont think you do."
 Goodwin took her wrists and drew them steadily apart.
            SANCTUARY            45
 Slowly and steadily he carried her hands around behind her and held them
 in one of his. With the other hand he opened the coat. The nightdress was
 of faded pink crepe, lacetrimmed, laundered and laundered until, like the
 garment on the wire, the lace was a fibrous mass.
 "Hah," he said. "Dressed for company."
  "Whose fault is it if this is the only one I have? Whose fault is it? Not
  mine. I've given them away to nigger maids after one night. But do you
  think any nigger would take this and not laugh in my face?"
  He let the coat fall to. He released her hands and she drew the coat
  together. With his hand on her shoulder he began to push her toward the
  door. "Go on," he said. Her shoulder gave. It alone moved, her body
  turning on her hips, her face reverted, watching him. "Go on," he said.
  But her torso alone turned, her hips and head still touching the wall.
  He turned and crossed the room and went swiftly around the bed and caught
  Temple by the front of the raincoat with one hand. He began to shake her.
  Holding her up by the gathered wad of coat he shook her, her small body
  clattering soundlessly inside the loose garment, her shoulders and thighs
  thumping against the wall. "You little fool!" he said. "You little fool!"
  Her eyes were quite wide, almost black, the lamplight on her face and two
  tiny reflections of his face in her pupils like peas in two inkwells.
  He released her. She began to sink to the floor, the raincoat rustling
  about her. He caught her up and began to shake her again, looking over
  his shoulder at the woman. "Get the lamp," he said. The woman did not
  move. Her head was bent a little; she appeared to muse upon them. Goodwin
  swept his other arm under Temple's knees. She felt herself swooping, then
  she was lying on the bed beside Gowan, on her back, jouncing to the dying
  chatter of the shucks. She watched him cross the room and lift the lamp
  from the mantel. The woman had turned her head, following him also, her
  face sharpening out of the approaching lamp in profile. "Go on," he said.
  She turned, her face turning into shadow, the lamp now on her back and
  on his hand on her shoulder. His shadow blotted the room completely; his
  arm in silhouette back-reaching, drew to the door. Gowan snored, each
  respiration choking to a huddle fall, as though he would never breathe
  again.
 Tommy was outside the door, in the hall.
 "They gone down to the truck yet?" Goodwin said.
 "Not yit," Tommy said.
  "Better go and see about it," Goodwin said. They went on. Tommy watched
  them enter another door. Then he went to the kitchen, silent on his bare
  feet, his neck craned a little
 46         WILLIAM FAULKNER

 with listening. In the kitchen Popeye sat, straddling a chair, smoking.
 Van stood at the table, before a fragment of mirror, combing his hair with
 a pocket comb. Upon the table lay a damp, blood-stained cloth and a
 burning cigarette. Tommy
 squatted outside the door, in the darkness.
  He was there when Goodwin came out with the raincoat. Goodwin critered
  the kitchen without seeing him. "Where's Tommy?" he said. Tommy heard
  Popeye say something, then Goodwin emerged with Van following him, the
  raincoat on his arm now. "Come on, now," Goodwin said. "Let's get that
  stuff out of here."
  Tommy's pale eyes began to glow faintly, like those of a cat. The woman
  could see them in the darkness when he crept into the room after Popeye,
  and while Popeye stood over the bed where Temple lay. They glowed
  suddenly out of the darkness at her, then they went away and she could
  hear him breathing beside her; again they glowed up at her with a quality
  furious and questioning and sad and went away again and he crept behind
  Popeye from the room.
  He saw Popeye return to the kitchen, but he did not follow at once. He
  stopped at the hall door and squatted there. His body began to writhe
  again in shocked indecision, his bare feet whispering on the floor with
  a faint, rocking movement as he swayed from side to side, his hands
  wringing slowly against his flanks. And Lee too, he said. And Lee too.
  Durn them fellers. Durn them fellers. Twice he stole along the porch
  until he could see the shadow of Popeye's hat on the kitchen floor, then
  returned to the hall and the door beyond which Temple lay and where Gowan
  snored. The third time he smelled Popeye's cigarette. Ef he'll jest keep
  that up, he said. And Lee too, he said, rocking from side to side in a
  dull, excruciating agony, And Lee too.
  When Goodwin came up the slope and onto the back porch Tommy was
  squatting just outside the door again. "What in hell . . ." Goodwin said.
  "Why didn't you come on? I've been looking for you for ten minutes." He
  glared at Tommy, then he looked into the kitchen. "You ready?" he said.
  Popeye came to the door. Goodwin looked at Tommy again. "What have you
  been doing?"
  Popeye looked at Tommy. Tommy stood now, rubbing his instep with the
  other foot, looking at Popeye.
 "What're you doing here?" Popeye said.
 "Aint doin nothin," Tommy said.
 "Are you following me around?"
 "I aint trailin nobody," Tommy said sullenly.
 "Well, dont, then," Popeye said.
 "Come on," Goodwin said. "Van's waiting." They went on.
            SANCTUARY            47
 Tommy followed them. Once he looked back at the house, then he shambled on
 behind them. From time to time he would feel that acute surge go over him,
 like his blood was too hot all of a sudden, dying away into that warm
 unhappy feeling that fiddle music gave them. Durn them fellers, he
 whispered, Durn them fellers.
                ix

 THE ROOM WAS DARK. THE WOMAN STOOD INSIDE THE DOOR, against the wall, in the
 cheap coat, the lace-trimmed crepe nightgown, just inside the lockless door.
 She could hear Gowan snoring in the bed, and the other men moving about, on
 the porch and in the hall and in the kitchen, talking, their voices
 indistinguishable through the door. After a while they got quiet. Then she
 could hear nothing at all save Gowan as he choked and snored and moaned
 through his battered nose and face.
  She heard the door open. The man came in, without trying to be silent. He
  entered, passing within a foot of her. She knew it was Goodwin before he
  spoke. He went to the bed. "I want the raincoat," he said. "Sit up and take
  it off." The woman could hear the shucks in the mattress as Temple sat up
  and Goodwin took the raincoat off of her. He returned across the floor and
  went out.
  She stood just inside the door. She could tell all of them by the way they
  breathed. Then, without having heard, felt, the door open, she began to
  smell something: the brilliantine which Popeye used on his hair. She did
  not see Popeye at all when he entered and passed her; she did not know he
  had entered yet; she was waiting for him; until Tommy entered, following
  Popeye. Tommy crept into the room, also soundless; she would have been no
  more aware of his entrance than of Popeye's, if it hadn't been for his
  eyes. They glowed, breast-high, with a profound interrogation, then they
  disappeared and the woman could then feel him, squatting beside her; she
  knew that he too was looking toward the bed over which Popeye stood in the
  darkness, upon which Temple and Gowan lay, with Gowan snoring and choking
  and snoring. The woman stood just inside the door.
  She could hear no sound from the shucks, so she remained motionless beside
  the door, with Tommy squatting beside her, his face toward the invisible
  bed. Then she smelled the brilliantine again. Or rather, she felt Tommy
  move from beside her, without a sound, as though the stealthy evacuation of
  his position blew soft and cold upon her in the black silence; without
  seeing or hearing him, she knew that he had crept
 48         WILLIAM FAULKNER

 again from the room, following Popeye. She heard them go down the hall;
 the last sound died out of the house.
  She went to the bed. Temple did not move until the woman touched her.
  Then she began to struggle. The woman found Temple's mouth and put her
  hand over it, though Temple had not attempted to scream. She lay on the
  shuck mattress, turning and thrashing her body from side to side, rolling
  her head, holding the coat together across her breast but making no
  sound.
  "You fool!" the woman said in a thin, fierce whisper. "It's me. It's just
  me."
  Temple ceased to roll her head, but she still thrashed from side to side
  beneath the woman's hand. "I'll tell my fatherl" she said. "I'll tell my
  father!"
  The woman held her. "Get up," she said. Temple ceased to struggle. She
  lay still, rigid. The woman could hear her wild breathing. "Will you get
  up and walk quiet?" the woman said.
  "Yes!" Temple said. "Will you get me out of here? Will you? Will you?"
  "Yes," the woman said. "Get up." Temple got up, the shucks whispering.
  In the further darkness Gowan snored, savage and profound. At first
  Temple couldn't stand alone. The woman held her up. "Stop it," the woman
  said. "You've got to stop it. You've got to be quiet."
  "I want my clothes," Temple whispered. "I haven't got anything on but .
  . ."
  "Do you want your clothes," the woman said, "or do you want to get out
  of here?"
  "Yes," Temple said. "Anything. If you'll just get me out of here."
  On their bare feet they moved like ghosts. They left the house and
  crossed the porch and went on toward the barn. When they were about fifty
  yards from the house the woman stopped and turned and jerked Temple up
  to her, and gripping her by the shoulders, their faces close together,
  she cursed Temple in a whisper, a sound no louder than a sigh and filled
  with fury. Then she flung her away and they went on. They entered the
  hallway. It was pitch black. Temple heard the woman fumbling at the wall.
  A door creaked open; the woman took her arm and guided her up a single
  step into a floored room where she could feel walls and smell a faint,
  dusty odor of grain, and closed the door behind them. As she did so
  something rushed invisibly nearby in a scurrying scrabble, a dying
  whisper of fairy feet. Temple whirled, treading on something that rolled
  under her foot, and sprang toward the woman.
 "It's just a rat," the woman said, but Temple hurled herself
            SANCTUARY            49
 upon the other, Ilinging her arms about her, trying to snatch both feet from
 the floor.
 "A rat?" she wailed, "a rat? Open the door! Quick!"
  "Stop it! Stop it!" the woman hissed. She held Temple until she ceased.
  They they knelt side by side against the wall. After a while the woman
  whispered: "There's some cottonseed-hulls over there. You can lie down."
  Temple didn't answer. She crouched against the woman, shaking slowly, and
  they squatted there in the black darkness, against the wall.

                X

 WHILE THE WOMAN WAS COOKING BREAKFAST, THE CHILD still-or already-asleep in
 the box behind the stove, she heard a blundering sound approaching across
 the porch and stop at the door. When she looked around she saw the wild and
 battered and bloody apparition which she recognized as Gowan. His face,
 beneath a two days' stubble, was marked, his lip cut. One eye was closed and
 the front of his shirt and coat were blood-stained to the waist. Through his
 swollen and stiffened lips he was trying to say something. At first the
 woman could not understand a word. "Go and bathe your face," she said.
 "Wait. Come in here and sit down. I'll get the basin."
  He looked at her, trying to talk. "Oh," the woman said. "She's all right.
  She's down there in the crib, asleep." She had to repeat it three or four
  times, patiently. "In the crib, Asleep. I stayed with her until daylight.
  Go wash your face, now!"
  Gowan got a little calmer then. He began to talk about getting a car.
  "The nearest one is at Tull's, two miles away," the woman said. "Wash your
  face and eat some breakfast."
  Gowan entered the kitchen, talking about getting the car. "I'll get it and
  take her on back to school. One of the other girls will slip her in. It'll
  be all right then. Dent you think it'll be all right then?" He came to the
  table and took a cigarette from the pack and tried to light it with his
  shaking hands. He had trouble putting it into his mouth, and he could not
  light it at all until the woman came and held the match. But he took but
  one draw, then he stood, holding the cigarette in his hand, looking at it
  with his one good eye in a kind of dull amazement, lie threw the cigarette
  away and turned toward the door, staggering and catching himself. "Go get
  car," he said.
  "Get something to eat first," the woman said. "Maybe a cup of coffee will
  help you."
 50         WILLIAM FAULKNER

  "Go get car," Gowan said. When he crossed the porch he paused long enough
  to splash some water upon his face, without helping his appearance much.
  When he left the house he was still groggy and he thought that he was
  still drunk. He could remember only vaguely what had happened. He had got
  Van and the wreck confused and he did not know that he had been knocked
  out twice. He only remembered that he had passed out some time early in
  the night, and he thought that he was still drunk. But when he reached
  the wrecked car and saw the path and followed it to the spring and drank
  of the cold water, he found that it was a drink he wanted, and he knelt
  there, bathing his face in the cold water and trying to examine his
  reflection in the broken surface, whispering Jesus Christ to himself in
  a kind of despair. He thought about returning to the house for a drink,
  then he thought of having to face Temple, the men; of Temple there among
  them.
  When he reached the highroad the sun was well up, warm. I'll get cleaned
  up some, he said. And coming back with a car. I'll decide what to say to
  her on the way to town; thinking of Temple returning among people who
  knew him, who might know him. I passed out twice, he said. I passed out
  twice. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ he whispered, his body writhing inside
  his disreputable and bloody clothes in an agony of rage and shame.
  His head began to clear with air and motion, but as he began to feel
  better physically the blackness of the future increased. Town, the world,
  began to appear as a black cul-desac; a place in which he must walk
  forever more, his whole body cringing and flinching from whispering eyes
  when he had passed, and when in midmorning he reached the house he
  sought, the prospect of facing Temple again was more than he could bear.
  So he engaged the car and directed the man and paid him and went on. A
  little later a car going in the opposite direction stopped and picked him
  up.

                X1

 TEmPLE WAKED LYING IN A TIGHT BALL, WITH NARROW BARS
 of sunlight falling across her face like the tines of a golden fork, and
 while the stiffened blood trickled and tingled through her cramped muscles
 she lay gazing quietly up at the ceiling. Like the walls, it was of rough
 planks crudely laid, each plank separated from the next by a thin line of
 blackness; in the corner a square opening above a ladder gave into a
 gloomy loft shot with thin pencils of sun also. From nails in the walls
 broken bits 'of desiccated harness hung, and she lay plucking
            SANCTUARY            51
 tentatively at the substance in which she lay. She gathered a handful of it
 and lifted her head, and saw within her fallen coat naked flesh between
 brassiere and knickers and knickers and stockings. Then she remembered the
 rat and scrambled up and sprang to the door, clawing at it, still clutching
 the fist full of cottonseed-hulls, her face puffed with the hard slumber of
 seventeen.
  She had expected the door to be locked and for a time she could not pull it
  open, her numb hands scoring at the undressed planks until she could hear
  her finger nails. It swung back and she sprang out. At once she sprang back
  into the crib and banged the door to. The blind man was coming down the
  slope at a scuffling trot, tapping ahead with the stick, the other hand at
  his waist, clutching a wad of his trousers. He passed the crib with his
  braces dangling about his hips, his gymnasium shoes scuffing in the dry
  chaff of the hallway, and passed from view, the stick rattling lightly
  along the rank of empty stalls.
  Temple crouched against the door, clutching her coat about her. She could
  hear him back there in one of the stalls. She opened the door and peered
  out, at the house in the bright May sunshine, the sabbath peace, and she
  thought about the girls and men leaving the dormitories in their new Spring
  clothes, strolling along the shaded streets toward the cool, unhurried
  sound of bells. She lifted her foot and examined the soiled sole of her
  stocking, brushing at it with her palm, then at the other one.
  The blind man's stick clattered again. She jerked her head back and closed
  the door to a crack and watched him pass, slower now, hunching his braces
  onto his shoulders. He mounted the slope and entered the house. Then she
  opened the door and stepped gingerly down.
  She walked swiftly to the house, her stockinged feet flinching and cringing
  from the rough earth, watching the house. She mounted to the porch and
  entered the kitchen and stopped, listening into the silence. The stove was
  cold. Upon it the blackened coffee-pot sat, and a soiled skillet; upon the
  table soiled dishes were piled at random. I haven't eaten since . . . since
  . . . Yesterday was one day, she thought, but I didn't eat then. I haven't
  eaten since . . . and that night was the dance, and I didn't eat any
  supper. I haven't eaten since dinner Friday, she thought. And now it's
  Sunday, thinking about the bells in cool steeples against the blue, and
  pigeons crooning about the belfries like echoes of the organ's bass. She
  returned to the door and peered out. Then she emerged, clutching the coat
  about her.
 She entered the house and sped up the hall. The sun lay
 52         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 now on the front porch and she ran with a craning motion of her head,
 watching the patch of sun framed in the door. It was empty. She reached
 the door to the right of the entrance and opened it and sprang into the
 room and shut the door and leaned her back against it. The bed was empty.
 A faded patchwork quilt was wadded across it. A khaki-covered canteen and
 one slipper lay on the bed. On the floor her dress and hat lay.
  She picked up the dress and hat and tried to brush them with her hand and
  with the corner of her coat. Then she sought the other slipper, moving
  the quilt, stooping to look under the bed. At last she found it in the
  fireplace, in a litter of wood ashes between an iron fire-dog and an
  overturned stack of bricks, lying on its side, half full of ashes, as
  though it had been flung or kicked there. She emptied it and wiped it on
  her coat and laid it on the bed and took the canteen and hung it on a
  nail in the wall. It bore the letters U S and a blurred number in black
  stencil. Then she removed the coat and dressed.
  Long legged, thin armed, with high small buttocks-a small childish figure
  no longer quite a child, not yet quite a woman -she moved swiftly,
  smoothing her stockings and writhing into her scant, narrow dress. Now
  I can stand anything, she thought quietly, with a kind of dull, spent
  astonishment; I can stand just anything. From the top of one stocking she
  removed a watch on a broken black ribbon. Nine o'clock. With her fingers
  she combed her matted curls, combing out three or four cottonseed-hulls.
  She took up the coat and hat and listened again at the door.
  She returned to the back porch. In the basin was a residue of dirty
  water. She rinsed it and filled it and bathed her face. A soiled towel
  hung from a nail. She used it gingerly, then she took a compact from her
  coat and was using it when she found the woman watching her in the
  kitchen door.
  "Good morning," Temple said. The woman held the child on her hip. It was
  asleep. "Hello, baby," Temple said, stooping; "you wan s'eep all day?
  Look at Temple." They entered the kitchen. The woman poured coffee into
  a cup.
  "It's cold, I expect," she said. "Unless you want to make up a fire."
  From the oven she took a pan of bread.
  "No," Temple said, sipping the lukewarm coffee, feeling her insides move
  in small, tickling clots, like loose shot. "I'm not hungry. I haven't
  eaten in two days, but I'm not hungry. Isn't that funny? I haven't eaten
  in . . ." She looked at the woman's back with a fixed placative grimace.
  "You haven't got a bathroom, have you?"
 "What?" the woman said. She looked at Temple across
            SANCTUARY            53
 her shoulder while Temple stared at her with that grimace of cringing and
 placative assurance. From a shelf the woman took a mail-order catalogue
 and tore out a few leaves and handed them to Temple. "You'll have to go
 to the barn, like we do."
 "Will IT' Temple said, holding the paper. "The barn."
  "They're all gone," the woman said. "They wont be back this morning."
 "Yes," Temple said. "The barn."
  "Yes; the barn," the woman said. "Unless you're too pure to have to."
  "Yes," Temple said. She looked out the door, across the weed-choked
  clearing. Between the sombre spacing of the cedars the orchard lay bright
  in the sunlight. She donned the coat and hat and went toward the barn,
  the torn leaves in her hand, splotched over with small cuts of
  clothes-pins and patent wringers and washing-powder, and entered the
  hallway. She stopped, folding and folding the sheets, then she went on,
  with swift, cringing glances at the empty stalls. She walked right
  through the barn. It was open at the back, upon a mass of jimson weed in
  savage white-and-lavender bloom. She walked on into the sunlight again,
  into the weeds. Then she began to run, snatching her feet up almost
  before they touched the earth, the weeds slashing at her with huge,
  moist, malodorous blossoms. She stooped and twisted through a fence of
  sagging rusty wire and ran downhill among trees.
  At the bottom of the hill a narrow scar of sand divided the two slopes
  of a small valley, winding in a series of dazzling splotches where the
  sun found it. Temple stood in the sand, listening to the birds among the
  sunshot leaves, listening, looking about. She followed the dry runlet to
  where a jutting shoulder formed a nook matted with bricrs. Among the new
  green last year's dead leaves from the branches overhead clung, not yet
  fallen to earth. She stood here for a while, folding and folding the
  sheets in her fingers, in a kind of despair. When she rose she saw, upon
  the glittering mass of leaves along the crest of the ditch, the squatting
  outline of a man.
  For an instant she stood and watched herself run out of her body, out of
  one slipper. She watched her legs twinkle against the sand, through the
  flecks of sunlight, for several yards, then whirl and run back and snatch
  up the slipper and whirl and run again.
  When she caught a glimpse of the house she was opposite the front porch.
  The blind man sat in a chair, his face lifted into the sun. At the edge
  of the woods she stopped and put on the slipper. She crossed the ruined
  lawn and sprang onto the porch and ran down the hall. When she reached
  the back
 54         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 porch she saw a man in the door of the barn, looking toward the house. She
 crossed the porch in two strides and entered the kitchen, where the woman
 sat at the table, smoking, the child on her lap.
  "He was watching me!" Temple said. "He was watching me all the time!" She
  leaned beside the door, peering out, then she came to the woman, her face
  small and pale, her eyes like holes burned with a cigar, and laid her
  hand on the cold stove.
 "Who was?" the woman said.
  "Yes," Temple said. "He was there in the bushes, watching me all the
  time." She looked toward the door, then back at the woman, and saw her
  hand lying on the stove. She snatched it up with a wailing shriek,
  clapping it against her mouth, and turned and ran toward the door. The
  woman caught her arm, still carrying the child on the other, and Temple
  sprang back into the kitchen. Goodwin was coming toward the house. He
  looked once at them and went on into the hall.
  Temple began to struggle. "Let go," she whispered, "let go! Let go!" She
  surged and plunged, grinding the woman's hand against the door jamb until
  she was free. She sprang from the porch and ran toward the barn and into
  the hallway and climbed the ladder and scrambled through the trap and to
  her feet again, running toward the pile of rotting hay.
  Then suddenly she ran upside down in a rushing interval; she could see
  her legs still running in space, and she struck lightly and solidly on
  her back and lay still, staring up at an oblong yawn that closed with a
  clattering vibration of loose planks. Faint dust sifted down across the
  bars of sunlight.
  Her hand moved in the substance in which she lay, then she remembered the
  rat a second time. Her whole body surged in an involuted spurning
  movement that brought her to her feet in the loose hulls, so that she
  flung her hands out and caught herself upright, a hand on either angle
  of the corner, her face not twelve inches from the cross beam on which
  the rat crouched. For an instant they stared eye to eye, then its eyes
  glowed suddenly like two tiny electric bulbs and it leaped at her head
  just as she sprang backward, treading again on something that rolled
  under her foot.
  She fell toward the opposite corner, on her face in the hulls and a few
  scattered corn-cobs gnawed bone-clean. Something thudded against the wall
  and struck her hand in ricochet. The rat was in that corner now, on the
  floor. Again their faces were not twelve inches apart, the rat's eyes
  glowing and fading as though worked by lungs. Then it stood erect, its
  back to the corner, its forepaws curled against its chest, and began to
  .%aueak at her in tiny plaintive gasps. She backed away on
            SANCTUARY            55
 hands and knees, watching it. Then she got to her feet and sprang at the
 door, hammering at it, watching the rat over her shoulder, her body arched
 against the door, rasping at the planks with her bare hands.

               XH

 DIE WOMAN STOOD IN THE KITCHEN DOOR, HOLDING THE
 child, until Goodwin emerged from the house. The lobes of his nostrils
 were quite white against his brown face, and she said: "God, are you drunk
 too?" He came along the porch. "She's not here," the woman said. "You
 can't find her." He brushed past her, trailing a reek of whiskv. She
 turned, watching him. He looked swiftly about the kitchen, then he turned
 and looked at her standing in the door, blocking it. "You wont find her,"
 she said. "She's gone." He came toward her, lifting his arm. "Dont put
 your hand on me," she said. He gripped her arm, slowly. His eyes were a
 little bloodshot. The lobes of his nostrils looked like wax.
  "Take your hand off me," she said. "Take it off." Slowly he drew her out
  of the door. She began to curse him. "Do you think you can? Do you think
  I'll let you? Or any other little slut?" Motionless, facing one another
  like the first position of a dance, they stood in a mounting terrific
  muscular hiatus.
  With scarce any movement at all he flung her aside in a complete
  revolution that fetched her up against the table, her arm flung back for
  balance, her body bent and her hand fumbling behind her among the soiled
  dishes, watching him across the inert body of the child. He walked toward
  her. "Stand back," she said, lifting her hand slightly, bringing the
  butcher knife into view. "Stand back." He came steadily toward her, then
  she struck at him with the knife.
  He caught her wrist. She began to struggle. He plucked the child from her
  and laid it on the table and caught her other hand as it flicked at his
  face, and holding both wrists in one hand, he slapped her. It made a dry,
  flat sound. He slapped her again, first on one cheek, then the other,
  rocking her head from side to side. "That's what I do to them," he said,
  slapping her. "See?" He released her. She stumbled backward against the
  table and caught up the child and half crouched between the table and the
  wall, watching him as he turned and left the room.
  She knelt in the comer, holding the child. It had not stirred. She laid
  her palm first on one cheek, then on the other. She rose and laid the
  child in the box and took a sunbonnet from a nail and put it on. From
  another nail she took a coat trimmed
 56         WILLIAM FAULKNER

 with what had once been white fur, and took up the child and left the
 room.
  Tommy was standing in the barn, beside the crib, looking toward the
  house. The old man sat on the front porch, in the sun. She went down the
  steps and followed the path to the road and went on without looking back.
  When she came to the tree and the wrecked car she turned from the road,
  into a path. After a hundred yards or so she reached the spring and sat
  down beside it, the child on her lap and the hem of her skirt turned back
  over its sleeping face.
  Popeye came out of the bushes, walking gingerly in his muddy shoes, and
  stood looking down at her across the spring. His hand flicked to his coat
  and be fretted and twisted a cigarette and put it into his mouth and
  snapped a match with his thumb. "Jesus Christ," he said, "I told him
  about letting them sit around all night, swilling that goddarn stuff.
  There ought to be a law." He looked away in the direction in which the
  house lay. Then he looked at the woman, at the top of her sunbonnet,
  "Goofy house," he said. "That's what it is. It's not four days ago I find
  a bastard squatting here, asking me if I read books. Like he would jump
  me with a book or something. Take me for a ride with the telephone
  directory." Again he looked off toward the house, jerking his neck forth
  as if his collar were too tight. He looked down at the top of her sun-
  bonnet. "I'm going to town, see?" he said. "I'm clearing out. I've got
  enough of this." She did not look up. She adjusted the hem of the skirt
  above the child's face. Popeye went on, with light, finicking sounds in
  the underbrush. Then they ceased. Somewhere in the swamp a bird sang.

  Before he reached the house Popeye left the road and followed a wooded
  slope. When he emerged he saw Goodwin standing behind a tree in the
  orchard, looking toward the barn. Popeye stopped at the edge of the wood
  and looked at Goodwin's back. He put another cigarette into his mouth and
  thrust his fingers into his vest. He went on across the orchard, walking
  gingerly. Goodwin heard him and looked over his shoulder. Popeye took a
  match from his vest, flicked it into flame and lit the cigarette. Goodwin
  looked toward the barn again; Popeye stood at his shoulder, looking
  toward the barn.
  "Who's down there?" he said. Goodwin said nothing. Popeye jetted smoke
  from his nostrils. "I'm clearing out," he said. Goodwin said nothing,
  watching the barn. "I said I'm getting out of here," Popeye said. Without
  turning his head Goodwin cursed him. Popeye smoked quietly, the cigarette
  wreathing across his still, soft, black gaze. Then he turned and went
  toward the house. The old man sat in the sun. Popeye did not
            SANCTUARY            57
 enter the house. Instead he went on across the lawn and into the cedars
 until he was hidden from the house. Then he turned and crossed the garden
 and the weed-choked lot and entered the barn from the rear.
  Tommy squatted on his heels beside the crib door, looking toward the
  house. Popeye looked at him a while, smoking. Then he snapped the
  cigarette away and entered a stall quietly. Above the manger was a wooden
  rack for hay, just under an opening in the loft floor. Popeye climbed the
  rack and drew himself silently into the loft, his tight coat strained
  into thin ridges across his narrow shoulders and back.

               x1n

 Tommy WAS STANDING IN THE HALLWAY OF THE BARN WHEN
 Temple at last got the door of the crib open. When she recognised him she
 was half spun, leaping back, then she whirled and ran toward him and
 sprang down, clutching his arm. Then she saw Goodwin standing in the back
 door of the house and she whirled and leaped back into the crib and leaned
 her head around the door, her voice making a thin eeeeeeeeeeeee sound like
 bubbles in a bottle. She leaned there, scrabbling her hands on the door,
 trying to pull it to, hearing Tommy's voice.
  . . . Lee says hit wont hurt you none. All you got to do is lay down .
  . ." It was a dry sort of sound, not in her consciousness at all, nor his
  pale eyes beneath the shaggy thatch. She leaned in the door, wailing,
  trying to shut it. Then she felt his hand clumsily on her thigh . ... .
  . says hit wont hurt you none. All you got to do is . . ."
  She looked at him, his diffident, hard hand on her hip. "Yes," she said,
  "all right. Dont you let him in here."
 "You mean fer me not to let none of them in hyer?"
  "All right. I'm not scared of rats. You stay there and dont let him in."
  "All right. I'll fix hit so caint nobody git to you. I'll be right hyer."
 "All right. Shut the door. Dont let him in here."
  "All right." He shut the door. She leaned in it, looking toward the
  house. He pushed her back so he could close the door. 'Hit aint goin' to
  hurt you none, Lee says. All you got to do is lay down."
  "All right. I will. Dont you let him in here." The door closed. She heard
  him drive the hasp to. Then he shook the door.
  "Hit's fastened," he said. "Caint nobody git to you now. I'll be right
  hyer."
 58         WILLIAM FAULKNER
  He squatted on his heels in the chaff, looking at the house. After a
  while he saw Goodwin come to the back door and look toward him, and
  squatting, clasping his knees, Tommy's eyes glowed again, the pale irises
  appearing for an instant to spin on the pupils like tiny wheels. He
  squatted there, his lip lifted a little, until Goodwin went back into the
  house. Then he sighed, expelling his breath, and he looked at the blank
  door of the crib and again his eyes glowed with a diffident, groping,
  hungry fire and he began to rub his hands slowly on his shanks, rocking
  a little from side to side. Then he ceased, became rigid, and watched
  Goodwin move swiftly across the corner of the house and into the cedars.
  He squatted rigid, his lip lifted a little upon his ragged teeth.
  Sitting in the cottonseed-hulls, in the litter of gnawed corncobs, Temple
  lifted her head suddenly toward the trap at the top of the ladder. She
  heard Popeye cross the floor of the loft, then his foot appeared, groping
  gingerly for the step. He descended, watching her over his shoulder.
  She sat quite motionless, her mouth open a little. He stood looking at
  her. He began to thrust his chin out in a series of jerks, as though his
  collar were too tight. He lifted his elbows and brushed them with his
  palm, and the skirt of his coat, then he crossed her field of vision,
  moving without a sound, his hand in his coat pocket. He tried the door.
  Then he shook it.
 "Open the door," he said.
  There was no sound. Then Tommy whispered: "Who's that?"
  "Open the door," Popeye said. The door opened. Tommy looked at Popeye.
  He blinked.
  "I didn't know you was in hyer," he said. He made to look past Popeye,
  into the crib. Popeye laid his hand flat on Tommy's face and thrust him
  back and leaned past him and looked up at the house. Then he looked at
  Tommy.
 "Didn't I tell you about following me?"
  "I wasn't following you," Tommy said. "I was watching him," jerking his
  head toward the house.
  "Watch him, then," Popeye said. Tommy turned his head and looked toward
  the house and Popeye drew his hand from his coat pocket.
  To Temple, sitting in the cottonseed-hulls and the corncobs, the sound
  was no louder than the striking of a match: a short, minor sound shutting
  down upon thp scene, the instant, with a profound finality, completely
  isolating it, and she sat there, her legs straight before her, her hands
  limp and palm-up on her lap, looking at Popeye's tight back and the
  ridges of his coat across the shoulders as he leaned out the
            SANCTUARY             59
 door, the pistol behind him, against his flank, wisping thinly along his
 leg.
  He turned and looked at her. He waggled the pistol slightly and put it
  back in his coat, then he walked toward her. Moving, he made no sound at
  all; the released door yawned and clapped against the jamb, but it made
  no sound either; it was as though sound and silence had become inverted.
  She could bear silence in a thick rustling as he moved toward her through
  it, thrusting it aside, and she began to say Something is going to happen
  to me. She was saying it to the old man with the yellow clots for eyes.
  "Something is happening to me!" she screamed at him, sitting in his chair
  in the sunlight, his hands crossed on the top of the stick. "I told you
  it was!" she screamed, voiding the words like hot silent bubbles into the
  bright silence about them until he turned his head and the two
  phlegm-clots above her where she lay tossing and thrashing on the rough,
  sunny boards. "I told you! I told you all the time!"

               x1v

 WHILE SHE WAS SITTING BESIDE THE SPRING, WITH THE SLEEPing child upon her
 knees, the woman discovered that she had forgot its bottle. She sat there
 for about an hour after Popeye left her. Then she returned to the road and
 turned back toward the house. When she was about halfway back to the
 house, carrying the child in her arms, Popeye's car passed her. She heard
 it coming and she got out of the road and stood there and watched it come
 dropping down the hill. Temple and Popeye were in it. Popeye did not make
 any sign, though Temple looked full at the woman. From beneath her hat
 Temple looked the woman full in the face, without any sign of recognition
 whatever. The face did not turn, the eyes did not wake; to the woman
 beside the road it was like a small, dead-colored mask drawn past her on
 a string and then away. The car went on, lurching and jolting in the ruts.
 The woman went on to the house.
  The blind man was sitting on the front porch, in the sun. When she
  entered the hall, she was walking fast. She was not aware of the child's
  thin weight. She found Goodwin in their bedroom. He was in the act of
  putting on a frayed tie; looking at him, she saw that he had just shaved.
 "Yes," she said. "What is it? What is it?"
  "I've got to walk up to Tull's and telephone for the sheriff," he said.
 "The sheriff," she said. "Yes. All right." She came to the
 60         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 bed and laid the child carefully down. "To Tull's," she said. "Yes. He's got
 a phone."
 "You'll have to cook," Goodwin said. "There's Pap."
  "You can give him some cold bread. He wont mind. There's some left in the
  stove. He wont mind."
 "I'll go," Goodwin said. "You stay here."
  "To Tull's," she said. "All right." Tull was the man at whose house Gowan
  had found a car. It was two miles away. Tull's family was at dinner. They
  asked her to stop. "I just want to use the telephone," she said. The
  telephone was in the dining-room, where they were eating. She called, with
  them sitting about the table. She didn't know the number. "The Sheriff,"
  she said patiently into the mouthpiece. Then she got the sheriff, with
  Tull's family sitting about the table, about the Sunday dinner. "A dead
  man. You pass Mr. Tull's about a mile and turn off to the right. . . . Yes,
  the Old Frenchman place. Yes. This is Mrs. Goodwin talking. . . . Goodwin.
  Yes."
                xv

 BENBOW REACHED HIS SISTER'S HOME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE afternoon. It was four
 miles from town, Jefferson. He and his sister were born in Jefferson, seven
 years apart, in a house which they still owned, though his sister had wanted
 to sell the house when Benbow married the divorced wife of a man named
 Mitchell and moved to Kinston. Benbow would not agree to sell, though he had
 built a new bunaglow in Kinston on borrowed money upon which he was still
 paying interest.
  When he arrived, there was no one about. He entered the house and he was
  sitting in the dim parlor behind the closed blinds, when he heard his
  sister come down the stairs, still unaware of his arrival. He made no
  sound. She had almost crossed the parlor door and vanished when she paused
  and looked full at him, without outward surprise, with that serene and
  stupid impregnability of heroic statuary; she was in white. "Oh, Horace,"
  she said.
  He did not rise. He sat with something of the air of a guilty small boy.
  "How did you-" he said. "Did Belle-"
  "Of course. She wired me Saturday. That you had left, and if you came here,
  to tell you that she had gone back home to Kentucky and had sent for Little
  Belle."
 "Ah, damnation," Benbow said.
  "Why?" his sister said. "You want to leave home yourself, but you dont want
  her to leave."
  He stayed at his sister's two days. She had never been given to talking,
  living a life of serene vegetation like perpetual corn
            SANCTUARY             61
 or wheat in a sheltered garden instead of a field, and during those two days
 she came and went about the house with an air of tranquil and faintly
 ludicrous tragic disapproval.
  After supper they sat in Miss Jenny's room, where Narcissa would read the
  Memphis paper before taking the boy off to bed. When she went out of the
  room, Miss Jenny looked at Benbow.
 "Go back home, Horace," she said.
  "Not to Kinston," Benbow said. "I hadn't intended to stay here, anyway. It
  wasn't Narcissa I was running to. I haven't quit one woman to run to the
  skirts of another."
  "If you keep on telling yourself that you may believe it, someday," Miss
  Jenny said. "Then what'll you do?"
  "You're right," Benbow said. "Then I'd have to stay at home."
  His sister returned. She entered the room with a definite air. "Now for
  it," Benbow said. His sister had not spoken directly to him all day.
  "What are you going to do, Horace?" she said. "You must have business of
  some sort there in Kinston that should be attended to."
  "Even Horace must have," Miss Jenny said. "What I want to know is, why he
  left. Did you find a man under the bed, Horace?"
  "No such luck," Benbow said. "It was Friday, and all of a sudden I knew
  that I could not go to the station and get that box of shrimp and-"
 "But you have been doing that for ten years," his sister said.
  "I know. That's how I know that I will never learn to like smelling
  shrimp."
  "Was that why you left Belle?" Miss Jenny said. She looked at him. "It took
  you a long time to learn that, if a woman dont make a very good wife for
  one man, she aint like to for another, didn't it?"
  "But to walk out just like a nigger," Narcissa said. "And to mix yourself
  up with moonshiners and street-walkers."
  "Well, he's gone and left the street-walker too," Miss Jenny said. "Unless
  you're going to walk the streets with that orangestick in your pocket until
  she comes to town."
  "Yes," Benbow said. He told again about the three of them, himself and
  Goodwin and Tommy sitting on the porch, drinking from the jug and talking,
  and Popeye lurking about the house, coming out from time to time to ask
  Tommy to light a lantern and go down to the barn with him and Tommy
  wouldn't do it and Popeye would curse him, and Tommy sitting on the floor,
  scouring his bare feet on the boards with a faint, hissing noise,
  chortling: "Aint he a sight, now?"
 62         WILLIAM FAULKNER
  "You could feel the pistol on him just like you knew he had a navel,"
  Benbow said. "He wouldn't drink, because he said it made him sick to his
  stomach like a dog; he wouldn't stay and talk with us; he wouldn't do
  anything: just lurking about, smoking his cigarettes, like a sullen and
  sick child.
  "Goodwin and I were both talking. He had been a cavalry sergeant in the
  Philippines and on the Border, and in an infantry regiment in France; he
  never told me why he changed, transferred to infantry and lost his rank.
  He might have killed someone, might have deserted. He was talking about
  Manila and Mexican girls, and that halfwit chortling and glugging at the
  jug and shoving it at me: 'Take some mo'; and then I knew that the woman
  was just behind the door, listening to us. They are not married. I know
  that just like I know that that little black man had that flat little
  pistol in his coat pocket. But she's out there, doing a nigger's work,
  that's owned diamonds and automobiles too in her day, and bought them
  with a harder currency than cash. And that blind man, that old man
  sitting there at the table, waiting for somebody to feed him, with that
  immobility of blind people, like it was the backs of their eyeballs you
  looked at while they were hearing music you couldn't hear; that Goodwin
  led out of the room and completely off the earth, as far as I know. I
  never saw him again. I never knew who he was, who he was kin to. Maybe
  not to anybody. Maybe that old Frenchman that built the house a hundred
  years ago didn't want him either and just left him there when he died or
  moved away."
  The next morning Benbow got the key to the house from his sister, and
  went into town. The house was on a side street, unoccupied now for ten
  years. He opened the house, drawing the nails from the windows. The
  furniture had not been moved. In a pair of new overalls, with mops and
  pails, he scoured the floors. At noon he went down town and bought
  bedding and some tinned food. He was still at work at six o'clock when
  his sister drove up in her car.
  "Come on home, Horace," she said. "Don't you see you cant do this?"
  "I found that out right after I started," Benbow said. "Until this
  morning I thought that anybody with one arm and a pail of water could
  wash a floor."
 "Horace," she said.
  "I'm the older, remember," he said. "I'm going to stay here. I have some
  covers." He went to the hotel for supper. When he returned, his sister's
  car was again in the drive. The negro driver had brought a bundle of
  bedclothing.
 "Miss Narcissa say for you to use them," the negro said.
            SANCTUARY             63

 Benbow put the bundle into a closet and made a bed with the ones which he
 had bought.
  Next day at noon, eating his cold food at the kitchen table, he saw
  through the window a wagon stop in the street, three women got down and
  standing on the curb they made unabashed toilets, smoothing skirts and
  stockings, brushing one another's back, opening parcels and donning
  various finery. The wagon had gone on. They followed, on foot, and he re-
  membered that it was Saturday. He removed the overalls and dressed and
  left the house.
  The street opened into a broader one. To the left it went on to the
  square, the opening between two buildings black with a slow, continuous
  throng, like two streams of ants, above which the cupola of the
  courthouse rose from a clump of oaks and locusts covered with ragged
  snow. He went on toward the square. Empty wagons still passed him and he
  passed still more women on foot, black and white, unmistakable by the
  unease of their garments as well as by their method of walking, believing
  that town dwellers would take them for town dwellers too, not even
  fooling one another.
  The adjacent alleys were choked with tethered wagons, the teams reversed
  and nuzzling gnawed corn-ears over the tail-boards. The square was lined
  two-deep with ranked cars, while the owners of them and of the wagons
  thronged in slow overalls and khaki, in mail-order scarves and parasols,
  in and out of the stores, soiling the pavement with fruit- and
  peanut-hulls. Slow as sheep they moved, tranquil, impassable, filling the
  passages, contemplating the fretful hurrying of those in urban shirts and
  collars with the large, mild inscrutability of cattle or of gods,
  functioning outside of time, having left time lying upon the slow and
  imponderable land green with corn and cotton in the yellow afternoon.
  Horace moved among them, swept here and there by the deliberate current,
  without impatience. Some of them he knew; most of the merchants and
  professional men remembered him as a boy, a youth, a brother
  lawyer-beyond a foamy screen of locust branches he could see the dingy
  secondstory windows where he and his father had practised, the glass
  still innocent of water and soap as then-and he stopped now and then and
  talked with them in unhurried backwaters.
  The sunny air was filled with competitive radios and phonographs in the
  doors of drug- and music-stores. Before these doors a throng stood all
  day, listening. The pieces which moved them were ballads simple in melody
  and theme, of bereavement and retribution and repentance metallically
  sung, blurred, emphasized by static or needle-disembodied voices blaring
  from imitation wood cabinets or pebble-grain horn-
   64         WILLIAM FAULKNER

 mouths above the rapt faces, the gnarled slow hands long shaped to the
 imperious earth, lugubrious, harsh, sad.
  That was Saturday, in May: no time to leave the land. Yet on Monday they
  were back again, most of them, in clumps about the courthouse and the
  square, and trading a little in the stores since they were here, in their
  khaki and overalls and collarless shirts. All day long a knot of them stood
  about the door to the undertaker's parlor, and boys and youths with and
  without schoolbooks leaned with flattened noses against the glass, and the
  bolder ones and the younger men of the town entered in twos and threes to
  look at the man called Tommy. He lay on a wooden table, barefoot, in
  overalls, the sunbleached curls on the back of his head matted with dried
  blood and singed with powder, while the coroner sat over him, trying to
  ascertain his last name. But none knew it, not even those who had known him
  for fifteen years about the countryside, nor the merchants who on
  infrequent Saturdays had seen him in town, barefoot, hatless, with his
  rapt, empty gaze and his cheek bulged innocently by a peppermint
  jawbreaker. For all general knowledge, he had none.

               XVI

 ON THE DAY WHEN THE SHERIFF BROUGHT GOODWIN TO TOWN, there was a negro
 murderer in the jail, who had killed his wife; slashed her throat with a
 razor so that, her whole head tossing further and further backward from the
 bloody regurgitation of her bubbling throat, she ra-n out the cabin door and
 for six or seven steps up the quiet moonlit lane. He would lean in the
 window in the evening and sing. After supper a few negroes gathered along
 the fence below-natty, shoddy suits and sweat-stained overalls shoulder to
 shoulder-and in chorus with the murderer, they sang spirituals while white
 people slowed and stopped in the leafed darkness that was almost summer, to
 listen to those who were sure to die and him who was already dead singing
 about heaven and being tired; or perhaps in the interval between songs a
 rich, sourceless voice coming out of the high darkness where the ragged
 shadow of the heaven-tree which snooded the street lamp at the corner
 fretted and mourned: "Fo days mo! Den dey ghy stroy de bes ba'ytone singer
 in nawth Mississippi!"
  Sometimes during the day he would lean there, singing alone then, though
  after a while one or two ragamuffin boys or negroes with delivery baskets
  like as not, would halt at the fence, and the white men sitting in tilted
  chairs along the oil-foul wall of the garage across the street would listen
  above their steady jaws. "One day mo! Den Ise a gawn po sonnen
            SANCTUARY             65
 bitch. Say, Aint no place fer you in heavum! Say, Aint no place fer you
 in hell! Say, Aint no place fer you in jail!"
  "Damn that fellow," Goodwin said, jerking up his black head, his gaunt,
  brown, faintly harried face. "I aint in any position to wish any man that
  sort of luck, but I'll be damned . . . ... He wouldn't talk. "I didn't
  do it. You know that, yourself. You know I wouldn't have. I aint going
  say what I think. I didn't do it. They've got to hang it on me first. Let
  them do that. I'm clear. But if I talk, if I say what I think or believe,
  I won't be clear." He was sitting on the cot in his cell. He looked up
  at the windows: two orifices not much larger than sabre slashes.
  "Is he that good a shot?" Benbow said. "To hit a man through one of those
  windows?" Goodwin looked at him. "Who?"
 "Popeye," Benbow said.
 "Did Popeye do it?" Goodwin said.
 "Didn't he?" Benbow said.
  "I've told all I'm going to tell. I don't have to clear myself; it's up
  to them to hang it on me."
  "Then what do you want with a lawyer?" Benbow said. "What do you want me
  to do?"
  Goodwin was not looking at him. "If you'll just promise to get the kid
  a good newspaper grift when he's big enough to make change," he said.
  "Ruby'll be all right. Wont you, old gal?" He put his hand on the woman's
  head, scouring her hair with his hand. She sat on the cot beside him,
  holding the child on her lap. It lay in a sort of drugged immobility,
  like the children which beggars on Paris streets carry, its pinched face
  slick with faint moisture, its hair a damp whisper of shadow across its
  gaunt, veined skull, a thin crescent of white showing beneath its
  lead-colored eyelids.
  The woman wore a dress of gray crepe, neatly brushed and skilfully darned
  by hand. Parallel with each seam was that faint, narrow, glazed imprint
  which another woman would recognise at a hundred yards with one glance.
  On the shoulder was a purple ornament of the sort that may be bought in
  ten cent stores or by mail order; on the cot beside her lay a gray hat
  with a neatly darned veil; looking at it, Benbow could not remember when
  he had seen one before, when women ceased to wear veils.
  He took the woman to his house. They walked, she carrying the child while
  Benbow carried a bottle of milk, a few groceries, food in tin cans. The
  child still slept. "Maybe you hold it too much," he said. "Suppose we get
  a nurse for it."
  He left her at the house and returned to town, to a telephone, and he
  telephoned out to his sister's, for the car. The
 66         WILLIAM FAULKNER

 car came for him. He told his sister and Miss Jenny about the case over
 the supper table.
  "You're just meddling!" his sister said, her serene face, her voice,
  furious. "When you took another rn~m's wife and child away from him I
  thought it was dreadful, but I said At least he will not have the face
  to ever come back here again. And when you just walked out of the house
  like a nigger and left her I thought that was dreadful too, but I would
  not let myself believe you meant to leave her for good. And then when you
  insisted without any reason at all on leaving here and opening the house,
  scrubbing it yourself and all the town looking on and living there like
  a tramp, refusing to stay here where everybody would expect you to stay
  and think it funny when you wouldn't; and now to deliberately mix
  yourself up with a woman you said yourself was a streetwalker, a
  murderer's woman."
  "I cant help it. She has nothing, no one. In a made-over dress all neatly
  about five years out of mode, and that child that never has been more
  than half alive, wrapped in a piece of blanket scrubbed almost
  cotton-white. Asking nothing of anyone except to be let alone, trying to
  make something out of her life when all you sheltered chaste women-"
  "Do you mean to say ~. moonshiner hasn't got the money to hire the best
  lawyer in the country?" Miss Jenny said.
  "It's not that," Horace said. "I'm sure he could get a better lawyer.
  It's that-"
  "Horace," his sister said. She had been watching him. "Where is that
  woman?" Miss Jenny was watching him too, sitting a little forward in the
  wheel chair. "Did you take that woman into my house?"
  "It's my house too, honey." She did not know that for ten years he had
  been lying to his wife in order to pay interest on a mortgage on the
  stucco house he had built for her in Kinston, so that his sister might
  not rent to strangers that other house in Jefferson which his wife did
  not know he still owned any share in. "As long as it's vacant, and with
  that child-"
  "The house where my father and mother and your father and mother, the
  house where 1-1 won't have it. I won't have it."
  "Just for one night, then. I'll take her to the hotel in the morning.
  Think of her, alone, with that baby. . . . Sup lose it were you and Bory,
  and your husband accused of a murder you knew he didn't-"
  "I dont want to think about her. I wish I had never heard of the whole
  thing. To think that my brother- Dont you see that you are always having
  to Cle~ln U,) i4ter yoursi~lf? It's not that there's a litter left; it's
  that you-that- But to bring
            SANCTUARY            67
a streetwalker, a murderess, into the house where I was born."
 "Fiddlesticks," Miss Jenny said. "But, Horace, aint that what the lawyers
 call collusion? connivance?" Horace looked at her. "It seems to me you've
 already had a little more to do with these folks than the lawyer in the
 case should have. You were out there where it happened yourself not long
 ago. Folks might begin to think you know more than you've told."
  "That's so," Horace said, "Mrs Blackstone. And sometimes I have wondered
  why I haven't got rich at the law. Maybe I will, when I get old enough
  to attend the same law school you did."
  "If I were you," Miss Jenny said, "I'd drive back to town now and take
  her to the hotel and get her settled. It's not late."
  "And go on back to Kinston until the whole thing is over," Narcissa said.
  "These people are not your people. Why must you do such things?"
 "I cannot stand idly by and see injustice-"
  "You wont ever catch up with injustice, Horace," Miss Jenny said.
 "Well, that irony which lurks in events, then."
  "Hmmph," Miss Jenny said. "It must be because she is one woman you know
  that dont know anything about that shrimp."
  "Anyway, I've talked too much, as usual," Horace said. "So I'll have to
  trust you all-"
  "Fiddlesticks," Miss Jenny said. "Do you think Narcissa'd want anybody
  to know that any of her folks could know people that would do anything
  as natural as make love or rob or steal?" There was that quality about
  his sister. During all the four days between Kinston and Jefferson he had
  counted on that imperviousness. He hadn't expected her-any woman -to
  bother very much over a man she had neither married nor borne when she
  had one she did bear to cherish and fret over. But he had expected that
  imperviousness, since she had had it thirty-six years.
  When he reached the house in town a light burned in one room. He entered,
  crossing the floors which he had scrubbed himself, revealing at the time
  no more skill with a mop than he had expected, than he had with the lost
  hammer with which he nailed the windows down and the shutters to ten
  years ago, who could not even learn to drive a motor car. But that was
  ten years ago, the hammer replaced by the new one with which he had drawn
  the clumsy nails, the windows open upon scrubbed floor spaces still as
  dead pools within the ghostly embrace of hooded furniture.
  The woman was still up, dressed save for the hat. It lay on the bed where
  the child slept. Lying together there, they lent to the room a quality
  of transience more unmistakable than
 68         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 the makeshift light, the smug paradox of the made bed in a room otherwise
 redolent of long unoccupation. It was as though femininity were a current
 running through a wire along which a certain number of identical bulbs
 were hung.
  "I've got some things in the kitchen," she said. "I wont be but a
  minute."
  The child lay on the bed, beneath the unshaded light, and he wondered why
  women, in quitting a house, will remove all the lamp shades even though
  they touch nothing else; looking down at the child, at its bluish eyelids
  showing a faint crescent of bluish white against its lead-colored cheeks,
  the moist shadow of hair capping its skull, its hands uplifted, curl-
  palmed, sweating too, thinking Good God. Good God.
  He was thinking of the first time he had seen it, lying in a wooden box
  behind the stove in that ruined house twelve miles from town; of Popeye's
  black presence lying upon the house like the shadow of something no
  larger than a match failing monstrous and portentous upon something else
  otherwise familiar and everyday and twenty times its size; of the two of
  them-himself and the woman-in the kitchen lighted by a cracked and smutty
  lamp on a table of clean, spartan dishes and Goodwin and Popeye somewhere
  in the outer darkness peaceful with insects and frogs yet filled too with
  Popeye's presence in black and nameless threat. The woman drew the box
  out from behind the stove and stood above it, her hands still hidden in
  her shapeless garment. "I have to keep him in this so the rats cant get
  to him," she said.
  "Oh," Horace said, "you have a son." Then she showed him her hands, flung
  them out in a gesture at once spontaneous and diffident and
  self-conscious and proud, and told him he might bring her an
  orange-stick.
  She returned, with something wrapped discreetly in a piece of newspaper.
  He knew that it was a diaper, freshly washed, even before she said: "I
  made a fire in the stove. I guess I overstepped."
  "Of course not," he said. "It's merely a matter of legal precaution, you
  see," he said. "Better to put everybody to a little temporary discomfort
  than to jeopardize our case." She did not appear to be listening. She
  spread the blanket on the bed and lifted the child onto it. "You
  understand how it is," Horace said. "If the judge suspected that I knew
  more about it than the facts would warrant-I mean, we must try to give
  everybody the idea that holding Lee for that killing is just-"
  "Do you live in Jefferson?" she said, wrapping the blanket about the
  child.
  "No. I live in Kinston. I used to-1 have practised here, though."
            SANCTUARY            69
  "You have kinfolks here, though. Women. That used to live n this house."
  She lifted the child, tucking the blanket about t. Then she looked at
  him. "It's all right. I know how it is. Y'ou've been kind."
  "Damn it," he said, "do you think- Come on. Let's go on ,o the hotel. You
  get a good night's rest, and I'll be in early in :he morning. Let me take
  it."
  "I've got him," she said. She started to say something else, .ooking at
  him quietly for a moment, but she went on. He :urned out the light and
  followed and locked the door. She was already in the car. He got in.
  "Hotel, Isom," he said. "I never did learn to drive one," he ;aid.
  "Sometimes, when I think of all the time I have spent aot learning to do
  things . . ."
  The street was narrow, quiet. It was paved now, though he -ould remember
  when, after a rain, it had been a canal of blackish substance half earth,
  half water, with murmuring gutters in which he and Narcissa paddled and
  splashed with tucked-up garments and muddy bottoms, after the crudest of
  whittled boats, or made lob-lollies by treading and treading in one spot
  with the intense oblivion of alchemists. He could remember when, innocent
  of concrete, the street was bordered on either side by paths of red brick
  tediously and unevenly laid and worn in rich, random maroon mosaic into
  the black earth which the noon sun never reached; at that moment pressed
  into the concrete near the entrance of the drive, were the prints of his
  and his sister's naked feet in the artificial stone.
  The infrequent lamps mounted to crescendo beneath the arcade of a
  filling-station at the comer. The woman leaned suddenly forward. "Stop
  here, please, boy," she said. Isom put on the brakes. "I'll get out here
  and walk," she said.
  "You'll do nothing of the kind," Horace said. "Go on, Isom."
  "No; wait," the woman said. "We'll be passing people that know you. And
  then on the square."
 "Nonsense," Horace said. "Go on, Isom."
  "You get out and wait, then," she said. "He can come straight back."
  "You'll do no such thing," Horace said. "By heaven, IDrive on, Isoml"
  "You'd better," the woman said. She sat back in the seat. Then she leaned
  forward again. "Listen. You've been kind. You mean all right, but-"
 "You don't think I am lawyer enough, you mean?"
  "I guess I've got just what was coming to me. There's no use fighting
  it."
 70         WILLIAM FAULKNER
  "Certainly not, if you feel that way about it. But you don't. Or you'd
  have told Isom to drive you to the railroad station. Wouldn't you?" She
  was looking down at the child, fretting the blanket about its face. "You
  get a good night's rest and I'll be in early tomorrow." They passed the
  jail-a square building slashed harshly by pale slits of light. Only the
  central window was wide enough to be called a window, criss-crossed by
  slender bars. In it the negro murderer leaned; below along the fence a
  row of heads hatted and bare above work-thickened shoulders, and the
  blended voices swelled rich and sad into the soft, depthless evening,
  singing of heaven and being tired. "Dont you worry at all, now. Everybody
  knows Lee didn't do it."
  They drew up to the hotel, where the drummers sat in chairs along the
  curb, listening to the singing. "I must-" the woman said. Horace got down
  and held the door open. She didn't move. "Listen. I've got to tell-"
  "Yes," Horace said, extending his hand. "I know. I'll be in early
  tomorrow." He helped her down. They entered the hotel, the drummers
  turning to watch her legs, and went to the desk. The singing followed
  them, dimmed by the walls, the lights.
  The woman stood quietly nearby, holding the child, until Horace had done.
  "Listen," she said. The porter went on with the key, toward the stairs.
  Horace touched her arm, turning her that way. "I've got to tell you," she
  said.
  "In the morning," he said. "I'll be in early," he said, guiding her
  toward the stairs. Still she hung back, looking at him; then she freed
  her arm by turning to face him.
  "All right, then," she said. She said, in a low, level tone, her face
  bent a little toward the child: "We haven't got any money. rll tell you
  now. That last batch Popeye didn't-"
  "Yes, yes," Horace said; "first thing in the morning. I'll be in by the
  time you finish breakfast. Goodnight." He returned to the car, into the
  sound of the singing. "Home, Isom," he said. They turned and passed the
  jail again and the leaning shape beyond the bars and the heads along the
  fence. Upon the barred and slitted wall the splotched shadow of the
  heaven tree shuddered and pulsed monstrously in scarce any wind; rich and
  sad, the singing fell behind. The car went on, smooth and swift, passing
  the narrow street. "Here," Horace said, " where are you-" Isom clapped
  on the brakes.
 "Miss Narcissa say to bring you back out home," he said.
  "Oh, she did?" Horace said. "That was kind of her. You can tell her I
  changed her mind."
  Isom backed and turned into the narrow street and then into the cedar
  drive, the lights lifting and boring ahead into
            SANCTUARY            71
 the unpruned tunnel as though into the most profound blackness of the sea,
 as though among straying rigid shapes to which not even light could give
 color. The car stopped at the door and Horace got out. "You might tell her
 it was not to her I ran," he said. "Can you remember that?"

               XVII

 THE LAST TRUMPET-SHAPED BLOOM HAD FALLEN FROM THE heaven tree at the
 corner of the jail yard. They lay thick, viscid underfoot, sweet and
 oversweet in the nostrils with a sweetness surfeitive and moribund, and
 at night now the ragged shadow of full-fledged leaves pulsed upon the
 barred window in shabby rise and fall. The window was in the general room,
 the white-washed walls of which were stained with dirty hands, scribbled
 and scratched over with names and dates and blasphemous and obscene
 doggerel in pencil or nail or knife-blade. Nightly the negro murderer
 leaned there, his face checkered by the shadow of the grating in the
 restless interstices of leaves, singing in chorus with those along the
 fence below.
  Sometimes during the day he sang also, alone then save for the slowing
  passerby and ragamuffin boys and the garage men across the way. "One day
  mo! Aint not place fer you in heavum! Aint no place fer you in hell! Aint
  not place fer you in whitefolks' jail! Nigger, whar you gwine to? Whar
  you gwine to, nigger?"
  Each morning Isom fetched in a bottle of milk, which Horace delivered to
  the woman at the hotel, for the child. On Sunday afternoon he went out
  to his sister's. He left the woman sitting on the cot in Goodwin's cell,
  the child on her lap. Heretofore it had lain in that drugged apathy, its
  eyelids closed to thin crescents, but today it moved now and then in
  frail, galvanic jerks, whimpering.
  Horace went up to Miss Jenny's room. His sister had not appeared. "He
  won't talk," Horace said. "He just says they will have to prove he did
  it. He said they had nothing on him, no more than on the child. He
  wouldn't even consider bond, if he could have got it. He says he is
  better off in the jail. And I suppose he is. His business out there is
  finished now, even if the sheriff hadn't found his kettles and
  destroyed-"
 :'Kettles?"
  'His still. After he surrendered, they hunted around until they found the
  still. They knew what he was doing, but they waited until he was down.
  Then they all jumped on him. The good customers, that had been buying
  whiskey from him and drinking all that he would give them free and maybe
  trying
 72         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 to make love to his wife behind his back. You should hear them down town.
 This morning the Baptist minister took him for a text. Not only as a
 murderer, but as an adulterer; a polluter of the free
 Democratic-Protestant atmosphere of Yoknapatawpha county. I gathered that
 his idea was that Goodwin and the woman should both be burned as a sole
 example to that child; the child to be reared and taught the English
 language for the sole end of being taught that it was begot in sin by two
 people who suffered by fire for having begot it. Good God, can a man, a
 civilised man, seriously . . ."
  "They're just Baptists," Miss Jenny said. "What about the money?"
  "He had a little, almost a hundred and sixty dollars. It was buried in
  a can in the barn. They let him dig that up. 'That'll keep her' he says
  'until it's over. Then we'll clear out. We've been intending to for a
  good while. If I'd listened to her, we'd have gone already. You've been
  a good girl' he says. She was sitting on the cot beside him, holding the
  baby, and he took her chin in his hands and shook her head a little."
  "It's a good thing Narcissa aint going to be on that jury," Miss Jenny
  said.
  "Yes. But the fool wont even let me mention that that gorilla was ever
  on the place. He said 'They can't prove anything on me. I've been in a
  jam before. Everybody that knows anything about me knows that I wouldn't
  hurt a feeb.' But that wasn't the reason he doesn't want it told about
  that thug. And he knew I knew it wasn't, because he kept on talking,
  sitting there in his overalls, rolling his cigarettes with the sack
  hanging in his teeth. 'I'll just stay here until it blows over. I'll be
  better off here; can't do anything outside, anyway. And this will keep
  her, with maybe something for you until you're better paid.'
  "But I knew what he was thinking. 'I didn't know you were a coward' I
  said.
  " 'You do like I say' he said. 'I'll be all right here.' But he doesn't
  . . ." He sat forward, rubbing his hands slowly. "He doesn't realize. .
  . . Dammit, say what you want to, but there's a corruption about even
  looking upon evil, even by accident; you cannot haggle, traffic, with
  putrefactionYou've seen how Narcissa, just hearing about it, how it's
  made her restless and suspicious. I thought I had come back here of my
  own accord, but now I see that- Do you suppose she thought I was bringing
  that woman into the house at night, or something like that?"
  "I did too, at first," Miss Jenny said. "But I reckon now she's learned
  that you'll work harder for whatever reason you
            SANCTUARY             73
 think you have, than for anything anybody could offer you or give you."
  "You mean she'd let me think they never had any moneywhen she-"
  "Why not? Aint you doing all right without it?" Narcissa entered.
  "We were just talking about murder and crime," Miss Jenny said. "I hope
  you're through, then," Narcissa said. She did not sit down.
  "Narcissa has her sorrows too," Miss Jenny said. "Dont you, Narcissa?"
  "What now?" Horace said. "She hasn't caught Bory with alcohol on his
  breath, has she?"
 "She's been jilted. Her beau's gone and left her."
 "You're such a fool," Narcissa said.
  "Yes, sir," Miss Jenny said, "Gowan Stevens has thrown her down. He
  didn't even come back from that Oxford dance to say goodbye. He just
  wrote her a letter." She began to search about her in the chair. "And now
  I flinch everytime the doorbell rings, thinking that his mother-"
 "Miss Jenny," Narcissa said, "you give me my letter."
  "Wait," Miss Jenny said, "here it is. Now, what do you think of that for
  a delicate operation on the human heart without anaesthetics? I'm
  beginning to believe all this I hear, about how young folks learn all the
  things in order to get married, that we had to get married in order to
  learn."
 Horace took the single sheet.

 Narcissa my dear
  This has no heading. I wish it could have no date. But if
 my heart were as blank as this page, this would not be
 necessary at all. I will not see you again. I cannot write it,
 for I have gone through with an experience which I cannot
 -face. I have but one rift in the darkness, that is that I have
 injured no one save myself by my folly, and that the extent
 of that folly you will never learn. I need not say that the
 hope that you never learn it is the sole reason why I will not
 see you again. Think as well of me as you can. I wish I had
 the right to say, if you learn of my folly think not the less of
 me.                           G.

  Horace read the note, the single sheet. He held it between his hand. He
  did not say anything for a while.
  "Good Lord," Horace said. "Someone mistook him for a Mississippi man on
  the dance floor."
  "I think, if I were you-" Narcissa said. After a moment she said: "How
  much longer is this going to last, Horace?"
 74         WILLIAM FAULKNER
  "Not any longer than I can help. If you know of any way in which I can
  get him out of that jail by tomorrow."
  "There's only one way," she said. She looked at him for a moment. Then
  she turned toward the door. "Which way did Bory go? Dinner'll be ready
  soon." She went out.
  "And you know what that way is," Miss Jenny said. "If you aint got any
  backbone."
  "I'll know whether or not I have any backbone when you tell me what the
  other way is."
 "Go back to Belle," Miss Jenny said. "Go back home."

  The negro murderer was to be hung on a Saturday without pomp, buried
  without circumstance: one night he would be singing at the barred window
  and yelling down out of the soft myriad darkness of a May night; the next
  night he would be gone, leaving the window for Goodwin. Goodwin had been
  bound over for the June term of court, without bail. But still he would
  not agree to let Horace divulge Popeye's presence at the scene of the
  murder.
 "I'll tell you, they've got nothing on me," Goodwin said.
 "How do you know they haven't?" Horace said.
  "Well, no matter what they think they have on me, I stand a chance in
  court. But just let it get to Memphis that I said he was anywhere around
  there, what chance do you think I'd have to get back to this cell after
  I testified?"
 "You've got the law, justice, civilization."
  "Sure, if I spend the rest of my life squatting in that corner yonder.
  Come here." He led Horace to the window. "There are five windows in that
  hotel yonder that look into this one. And I've seen him light matches
  with a pistol at twenty feet. Why, damn it all, I'd never get back here
  from the courtroom the day I testified that."
 "But there's such a thing as obstruct-"
  "Obstructing damnation. Let him prove I did it. Tommy was found in the
  barn, shot from behind. Let them find the pistol. I was there, waiting..1
  didn't try to run. I could have, but I didn't. It was me notified the
  sheriff. Of course my being there alone except for her and Pap looked
  bad. If it was a stall, don't common sense tell you I'd have invented a
  better one?"
  "You're not being tried by common sense," Horace said. "You're being
  tried by a jury."
  "Then let them make the best of it. That's all they'll get. The dead man
  is in the barn, hadn't been touched; me and my wife and child and Pap in
  the house; nothing in the house touched; me the one that sent for the
  sheriff. No, no; I know I run a chance this way, but let me just open my
  head
            SANCTUARY             75
 about that fellow, and there's no chance to it. I know what I'll get."
  "But you heard the shot," Horace said. "You have already told that."
  "No," he said, "I didn't. I didn't bear anything. I don't know anything
  about it. . . . Do you mind waiting outside a minute while I talk to
  Ruby?"
 It was five minutes before she joined him. He said:
  "There's something about this that I don't know yet; that you and Lee
  haven't told me. Something he just warned you not to tell me. Isn't
  there?" She walked beside him, carrying the child. It was still
  whimpering now and then, tossing its thin body in sudden jerks. She tried
  to soothe it, crooning to it, rocking it in her arms. "Maybe you carry
  it too much," Horace said; "maybe if you could leave it at the hotel .
 "I guess Lee knows what to do," she said.
  "But the Lawyer should know all the facts, everything. He is the one to
  decide what to tell and what not to tell. Else, why have one? That's like
  paying a dentist to fix your teeth and then refusing to let him look into
  your mouth, don't you see? You wouldn't treat a dentist or a doctor this
  way." She said nothing, her head bent over the child. It wailed.
 "Hush," she said, "hush, now."
  "And worse than that, there's such a thing called obstructing justice.
  Suppose he swears there was nobody else there, suppose he is about to be
  cleared-which is not likely-and somebody turns up who saw Popeye about
  the place, or saw his car leaving. Then they'll say, if Lee didn't tell
  the truth about an unimportant thing, why should we believe him when his
  neck's in danger?"
  They reached the hotel. He opened the door for her. She did not look at
  him. "I guess Lee knows best," she said, going in. The child wailed, a
  thin, whimpering, distressful cry. "Hush," she said. "Shhhhhhhh."
  Isom had been to fetch Narcissa from a party; it was late when the car
  stopped at the corner and picked him up. A few of the lights were
  beginning to come on, and men were already drifting back toward the
  square after supper, but it was still too early for the negro murderer
  to begin to sing. "And he'd better sing fast, too." Horace said. "He's
  only got two days more." But he was not there yet. The jail faced west;
  a last faint copper-colored light lay upon the dingy grating and upon the
  small, pale blob of a hand, and in scarce any wind a blue wisp of tobacco
  floated out and dissolved raggedly away. "If it wasn't bad enough to have
  her husband there, without that poor brute counting his remaining breaths
  at the top of his voice. . . ."
 76         WILLIAM FAULKNER
  "Maybe they'll wait and hang them both together," Narcissa said. "They
  do that sometimes, don't they?"

  That night Horace built a small fire in the grate. It was not cool. He
  was using only one room now, taking his meals at the hotel; the rest of
  the house was locked again. He tried to read, then he gave up and
  undressed and went to bed, watching the fire die in the grate. He heard
  the town clock strike twelve. "When this is over, I think I'll go to
  Europe," he said. "I need a change. Either 1, or Mississippi, one."
  Maybe a few of them would still be gathered along the fence, since this
  would be his last night; the thick, smallheaded shape of him would be
  clinging to the bars, gorillalike, singing, while upon his shadow, upon
  the checkered orifice of the window, the ragged grief of the heaven tree
  would pulse and change, the last bloom fallen now in viscid smears upon
  the sidewalk. Horace turned again in the bed. "They ought to clean that
  damn mess off the sidewalk," he said. "Damn. Damn. Damn."
  He was sleeping late the next morning; he had seen daylight. He was
  wakened by someone knocking at the door. It was half-past six. He went
  to the door. The negro porter of the hotel stood there.
 "What?" Horace said. "Is it Mrs. Goodwin?"
 "She say for you to come when you up," the negro said.
 "Tell her I'll be there in ten minutes."
  As he entered the hotel he passed a young man with a small black bag,
  such as doctors carry. Horace went on up. The woman was standing in the
  half-open door, looking down the hall.
 "I finally got the doctor," she said. "But I wanted anyway.
  11 The child lay on the bed, its eyes shut, flushed and sweating, its
  curled hands above its head in the attitude of one crucified, breathing
  in short, whistling gasps. "He was sick all last night. I went and got
  some medicine and I tried to keep him quiet until daylight. At last I
  got the doctor." She stood beside the bed, looking down at the child.
  "There was a woman there," she said. "A young girl."
  "A-" Horace said. "Oh," he said. "Yes. You'd better tell me about it."

               XV111

 POPEYE DROVE SWIFTLY BUT WITHOUT ANY QUALITY OF
 haste or of flight, down the clay road and into the sand. Temple was
 beside him. Her hat was jammed onto the back of her head, her hair
 escaping beneath the crumpled brim in matted
            SANCTUARY             77
 clots. Her face looked like a sleepwalker's as she swayed limply to the
 lurching of the car. She lurched against Popeye, lifting her hand in limp
 reflex. Without releasing the wheel he thrust her back with his elbow.
 "Brace yourself," he said. "Come on, now."
  Before they came to the tree they passed the woman. She stood beside the
  road, carrying the child, the hem of her dress folded back over its face,
  and she looked at them quietly from beneath the faded sunbonnet, flicking
  swiftly in and out of Temple's vision without any motion, any sign.
  When they reached the tree Popeye swung the car out of the road and drove
  it crashing into the undergrowth and through the prone tree-top and back
  into the road again in a running popping of cane-stalks like musketry
  along a trench, without any diminution of speed. Beside the tree Gowan's
  car lay on its side. Temple looked vaguely and stupidly at it as it too
  shot behind.
  Popeye swung back into the sandy ruts. Yet there was -no flight in the
  action: he performed it with a certain vicious petulance, that was all.
  It was a powerful car. Even in the sand it held forty miles an hour, and
  up the narrow gulch to the highroad, where he turned north. Sitting
  beside him, braced against jolts that had already given way to a smooth
  increasing hiss of gravel, Temple gazed dully forward as the road she had
  traversed yesterday began to flee backward under the wheels as onto a
  spool, feeling her blood seeping slowly inside her loins. She sat limp
  in the corner of the seat, watching the steady backward rush of the
  land-pines in opening vistas splashed with fading dogwood; sedge; fields
  green with new cotton and empty of any movement, peaceful, as though
  Sunday were a quality of atmosphere, of light and shade-sitting with her
  legs close together, listening to the hot minute seeping of her blood,
  saying dully to herself, I'm still bleeding. I'm still bleeding.
  It was a bright, soft day, a wanton morning filled with that unbelievable
  soft radiance of May, rife with a promise of noon and of heat, with high
  fat clouds like gobs of whipped cream floating lightly as reflections in
  a mirror, their shadows scudding sedately across the road. It had been
  a lavender spring. The fruit trees, the white ones, had been in small
  leaf when the blooms matured; they had never attained that brilliant
  whiteness of last spring, and the dogwood had come into full bloom after
  the leaf also, in green retrograde before crescendo. But lilac and
  wistaria and redbud, even the shabby heaven trees, had never been finer,
  fulgent, with a burning scent blowing for a hundred yards along the
  vagrant air of April and May. The bougainvillea against the veranda would
 78         WILLIAM FAULKNER

 be large as basketballs and lightly poised as balloons, and looking vacantly
 and stupidly at the rushing roadside Temple began to scream.
  It started as a wail, raising, cut suddenly off by Popeye's hand. With her
  hands lying on her lap, sitting erect, she screamed, tasting the gritty
  acridity of his fingers while the car slewed squealing in the gravel,
  feeling her secret blood. Then he gripped her by the back of the neck and
  she sat motionless, her mouth round and open like a small empty cave. He
  shook her head.
  "Shut it," he said, "shut it;" gripping her silent. "Look at yourself.
  Here." With the other hand he swung the mirror on the windshield around and
  she looked at her image, at the uptilted hat and her matted hair and her
  round mouth. She began to fumble at her coat pockets, looking at her
  reflection. He released her and she produced the compact and opened it and
  peered into the mirror, whimpering a little. She powdered her face and
  rouged her mouth and straightened her hat, whimpering into the tiny mirror
  on her lap while Popeye watched her. He lit a cigarette. "Aint you ashamed
  of yourself?" he said.
  "It's stiH running," she whimpered. "I can feel it." With the lipstick
  poised she looked at him and opened her mouth again. He gripped her by the
  back of the neck.
 "Stop it, now. You going to shut it?"
 "Yes," she whimpered.
 "See you do, then. Come on. Get yourself fixed."
 She put the compact away. He started the car again.
  The road began to thicken with pleasure cars Sunday-bent --small,
  clay-crusted Fords and Chevrolets; an occasional larger car moving swiftly,
  with swathed women, and dustcovered hampers; trucks loaded with
  wooden-faced country people in garments like a colored wood meticulously
  carved; now and then a wagon or a buggy. Before a weathered frame church on
  a hill the grove was full of tethered teams and battered cars and trucks.
  The woods gave way to fields; houses became more frequent. Low above the
  skyline, above roofs and a spire or two, smoke hung. The gravel became
  asphalt and they entered Dumfries.
  Temple began to look about, like one waking from sleep. "Not herel" she
  said. " I can't-"
 "Hush it, now," Popeye said.
  "I cant-I might-" she whimpered. "I'm hungry," she said. "I haven't eaten
  since . . ."
 "Ah, you aint hungry. Wait till we get to town."
  She looked about with dazed, glassy eyes. "There might be people here . .
  ." He swung in toward a filling station. "I
            SANCTUARY            79
cant get out," she whimpered. "It's still running, I tell you!" "Who told you
 to get out?" He descended and looked at her across the wheel. "Dont you
 move." She watched him go up the street and enter a door. It was a dingy
 confectionery. He bought a pack of cigarettes and put one in his mouth.
 "Gimme a couple of bars of candy," he said.
 "What kind?"
  "Candy," he said. Under a glass bell on the counter a plate of sandwiches
  sat. He took one and flipped a dollar on the counter and turned toward
  the door.
 "Here's your change," the clerk said.
 "Keep it," he said. 'You'll get rich faster."
  When he saw the car it was empty. He stopped ten feet away and changed
  the sandwich to his left hand, the unlighted cigarette slanted beneath
  his chin. The mechanic hanging the hose up, saw him and jerked his thumb
  toward the corner of the building.
  Beyond the comer the wall made an offset. In the niche was a greasy
  barrel half full of scraps of metal and rubber. Between the barrel and
  the wall Temple crouched. "He nearly saw me!" she whispered. "He was
  almost looking right at me!"
  "Who?" Popeye said. He looked back up the street. "Who saw you?"
  "He was coming right toward mel A boy. At school. He was looking right
  toward-"
 "Come on. Come out of it."
  "He was look-" Popeye took her by the arm. She crouched in the corner,
  jerking at the arm he held, her wan face craned around the corner.
  "Come on, now." Then his hand was at the back of her neck, gripping it.
  "Oh," she wailed in a choked voice. It was as though he were lifting her
  slowly erect by that one hand. Excepting that, there was no movement
  between them. Side by side, almost of a height, they appeared as decorous
  as two acquaintances stopped to pass the time of day before entering
  church.
 "Are you coming?" he said. "Are you?"
  "I cant. It's down to my stocking now. Look." She lifted her skirt away
  in a shrinking gesture, then she dropped the skirt and rose again, her
  torso arching backward, her soundless mouth open as he gripped her. He
  released her.
 "Will you come now?"
 She came out from behind the barrel. He took her arm.
 "It's all over the back of my coat," she whimpered. "Look."
  "You're all right. I'll get you another coat tomorrow. Come on.,,
 They returned to the car. At the comer she hung back
 80         WILLIAM FAULKNER

 again. "You want some more of it, do you?" he whispered not touching her.
 "Do you?" She went on and got into the car quietly. Be took the wheel.
 "Here, I got you a sandwich." He took it from his pocket and put it in her
 hand. "Come on, now. Eat it." She took a bite obediently. He started the
 car and took the Memphis road. Again, the bitten sandwich in her hand, she
 ceased chewing and opened her mouth in that round, hopeless expression of
 a child; again his hand left the wheel and gripped the back of her neck
 and she sat motionless, gazing straight at him, her mouth open and the
 half chewed mass of bread and meat lying upon her tongue.
  They reached Memphis in midafternoon. At the foot of the bluff below Main
  Street Popeye turned into a narrow street of smoke-grimed frame houses
  with tiers of wooden galleries set a little back in grassless plots, and
  now and then a forlorn and hardy tree of some shabby species-gaunt,
  lopbranched magnolias, a stunted elm or a locust in grayish, cadaverous
  bloom -interspersed by rear ends of garages; a scrap-heap in a vacant
  lot; a low doored cavern of an equivocal appearance where an
  oilcloth-covered counter and a row of backless stools, a metal coffee-urn
  and a fat man in a dirty apron with a toothpick in his mouth, stood for
  an instant out of the gloom with an effect as of a sinister and
  meaningless photograph poorly made. From the bluff, beyond a line of
  office buildings terraced sharply against the sunfilled sky, came a sound
  of traffic-motor horns, trolleys-passing high overhead on the river
  breeze; at the end of the street a trolley materialised in the narrow gap
  with an effect as of magic and vanished with a stupendous clatter. On a
  second storey gallery a young negress in her underclothes smoked a
  cigarette sullenly, her arms on the balustrade.
  Popeye drew up before one of the dingy three-storey houses, the entrance
  of which was hidden by a dingy lattice cubicle leaning a little awry. In
  the grimy grassplot before it two of those small, woolly, white,
  worm-like dogs, one with a pink, the other a blue, ribbon about its neck,
  moved about with an air of sluggish and obscene paradox. In the sunlight
  their coats looked as though they had been cleaned with gasoline.
  Later Temple could hear them outside her door, whimpering and scuffing,
  or, rushing thickly in when the negro maid opened the door, climbing and
  sprawling onto the bed and into Miss Reba's lap with wheezy, flatulent
  sounds, billowing into the rich pneumasis of her breast and tonguing
  along the metal tankard which she waved in one ringed hand as she talked.
 "Anybody in Memphis can tell you who Reba Rivers is. Ask
            SANCTUARY            81
 any man on the street, cop or not. I've had some of the biggest men in
 Memphis right here in this house, bankers, lawyers, doctors-all of them.
 I've had two police captains drinking beer in my dining-room and the
 commissioner himself upstairs with one of my girls. They got drunk and
 crashed the door in on him and found him buck-nekkid, dancing the highland
 fling. A man fifty years old, seven foot tall, with a head like a peanut.
 He was a fine fellow. He knew me. They all know Reba Rivers. Spent their
 money here like water, they have. They know me. I aint never
 double-crossed nobody, honey." She drank beer, breathing thickly into the
 tankard, the other hand, ringed with yellow diamonds as large as gravel,
 lost among the lush billows of her breast.
  Her slightest movement appeared to be accomplished by an expenditure of
  breath out of all proportion to any pleasure the movement could afford
  her. Almost as soon as they entered the house she began to tell Temple
  about her asthma, toiling up the stairs in front of them, planting her
  feet heavily in worsted bedroom slippers, a wooden rosary in one hand and
  the tankard in the other. She had just returned from church, in a black
  silk gown and a hat savagely flowered; the lower half of the tankard was
  still frosted with inner chill. She moved heavily from big thigh to
  thigh, the two dogs moiling underfoot, talking steadily back across her
  shoulder in a harsh, expiring, maternal voice.
  "Popeye knew better than to bring you anywhere else but to my house. I
  been after him for, how many years I been after you to get you a girl,
  honey? What I say, a young fellow can't no more live without a girl than
  . . ." Panting, she fell to cursing the dogs under her feet, stopping to
  shove them aside. "Get back down there," she said, shaking the rosary at
  them. They snarled at her in vicious falsetto, baring their teeth, and
  she leaned against the wall in a thin aroma of beer, her hand to her
  breast, her mouth open, her eyes fixed in a glare of sad terror of all
  breathing as she sought breath, the tankard a squat soft gleam like dull
  silver lifted in the gloom.
  The narrow stair-well turned back upon itself in a succession of niggard
  reaches. The light, falling through a thicklycurtained door at the front
  and through a shuttered window at the rear of each stage, had a weary
  quality. A spent quality: defunctive, exhausted-a protracted weariness
  like a vitiated backwater beyond sunlight and the vivid noises of sun-
  light and day. There was a defunctive odor of irregular food, vaguely
  alcoholic, and Temple even in her ignorance seemed to be surrounded by
  a ghostly promiscuity of intimate garments, of discreet whispers of flesh
  stale and oft-assailed and impregnable beyond each silent door which they
  passed. Be-
   82         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 hind her, about hers and Miss Reba's feet the two dogs scrabblc,l 'n nappy
 gleams, their claws clicking on the metal strips which bound the carpet
 to the stairs.
  Later, lying in bed, a towel wrapped about her naked loins, she could
  hear them sniffin. and whining outside the door. Her coat and hat hung
  on nails on the door, her dress and stockings lay upon a chair, and it
  seemed to her that she COU d Ilear the rhythmic splush-splush of the
  washing-board somewhere and she flung herself again in an agony for con-
  cealment as she had when they took her knickers off.
  "Now, now," Miss Reba s-!id. "I bled for four days, myself. It aint
  nothing. Doctor Quinn'll stop it in two minutes, and Minnie'll have them
  all washed and pressed and you won't never know it. That blood'11 be
  worth a thousand dollars to you honey." She lifted the tankard, the
  flowers on her hat rigidly moribund, nodding in macabre wassail. "Us poor
  girls," she said. The drawn shades, cracked into a myriad pattern like
  old skin, bl--w faintly on the bright air, breathing into the room on
  w~,ning surges the sound of Sabbath traffic, festive, steady, evanescent.
  Temple lay motionless in the bed, her legs straight and close, in covers
  to her chin and her face sm~dl and wan, framed in the rich sprawl of her
  hair. Miss Reba lowered the tankard, gasping for breath. In her hoarse,
  fainting voice she beg;~n to tell Temple how lucky she was.
  "Every girt in the district has been trying to get him, honey. There's
  one, a little married woman slips down here sometimes, she offered Minnie
  twenty-five dollars just to get him into the room, that's all. But do you
  think he'd so much as look at one of them'? Girls that have took a
  hundred dollars a night. No, sir. Spend his money like water, but do you
  think he'd look at one of them except to dance with her? I always knowed
  it wasn't going to be none of these here common whores he'd take. I'd
  tell them, I'd say, the one of yez that gets him'll wear diamonds, I
  says, but it aint going to be none of you common whores, and now
  Minnie'll have them washed and pressed until you wont know it."
 "I cant wear it again," Temple whispered. "I cant."
  "No more you'll have to, if you don't want, You can give them to Minnie,
  though I don't know what she'll do with them except maybe-" At the door
  the dogs began to whimper louder. Feet approached. The door opened. A
  negro maid entered, carrying a tray bearing a quart bottle of beer and
  a glass of gin, the dogs surging in around her feet. "And tomorrow the
  stores'll be open and me and you'll go shopping, like he said for us to.
  Like I said, the girl that gets him'll wear diamonds: you just see if I
  wasn't-" she turned, mountainous, the tankard lifted, as the two dogs
  scrambled onto the
            SANCTUARY            83
 bed and then onto her lap, snapping viciously at one another. From their
 curled shapeless faces bead-like eyes glared with choleric ferocity, their
 mouths gaped pinkly upon needle-like teeth. "Reba!" Miss Reba said, "get
 down! You, Mr. Binford!" Hinging them down, their teeth clicking about her
 hands. "You just bite me, you- Did you get Miss- What's your name, honey?
 I didn't quite catch it."
 "Temple," Temple whispered.
  "I mean, your first name, honey. We don't stand on no ceremony here."
 "That's it. Temple. Temple Drake."
  "You got a boy's name, aint you?-Miss Temple's things washed, Minnie?"
  "Yessum," the maid said. "Hit's dryin' now hind the stove." She came with
  the tray, shoving the dogs gingerly aside while they clicked their teeth
  at her ankles.
 "You wash it out good?"
  "I had a time with it," Minnie,said. "Seem like that the most hardest
  blood of all to get-" With a convulsive movement Temple flopped over,
  ducking her head beneath the covers. She felt Miss Reba's hand.
  "Now, now. Now, now. Here, take your drink. This one's on me. I aint
  going to let no girl of Popeye's-"
 "I dont want anymore," Temple said.
  "Now, now," Miss Reba said. "Drink it and you'll feel better." She lifted
  Temple's head. Temple clutched the covers to her throat. Miss Reba held
  the glass to her lips. She gulped it, writhed down again, clutching the
  covers about her, her eyes wide and black above the covers. "I bet you
  got that towel disarranged," Miss Reba said, putting her hand on the
  covers.
  "No," Temple whispered. "It's all right. It's still there." She shrank,
  cringing: they could see the cringing of her legs beneath the covers.
  "Did you get Dr. Quinn, Minnie?" Miss Reba said.
  "Yessum." Minnie was filling the tankard from the bottle, a dull frosting
  pacing the rise of liquor within the metal. I 'He say he dont make no
  Sunday afternoon calls."
  "Did you tell him who wanted him? Did you tell him Miss Reba wanted him?"
 "Yessum. He say he dont-"
  "You go back and tell that suh- You tell him I'll- No; wait." She rose
  heavily. "Sending a message like that back to me, that can put him in
  jail three times over." She waddled toward the door, the dogs crowding
  about the felt slippers. The maid followed and closed the door. Temple
  could hear Miss Reba cursing the dogs as she descended the stairs with
  terrific slowness. The sounds died away.
 84         WILLIAM FAULKNER

  The shades blew steadily in the windows with faint rasping sounds. Temple
  began to hear a clock. It sat on the mantle above a grate filled with
  fluted green paper. The clock was of flowered china, supported by four
  china nymphs. It had only one hand, scrolled and gilded, halfway between
  ten and eleven, lending to the otherwise blank face a quality of
  unequivocal assertion, as though it had nothing whatever to do with time.
  Temple rose from the bed. Holding the towel about her she stole toward
  the door, her ears acute, her eyes a little bl;nd with the strain of
  listening. It was twilight; in a dim mirror, a pellucid oblong of dusk
  set on end, she had a .1i:-npse of herself like a thin ghost, a pale
  shadow moving in the uttermost profundity of shadow. She reached the
  door. At once she began to hear a hundred conflicting sounds in a single
  converging threat and she clawed furiously at the door until she found
  the bolt, dropping the towel to drive it home. Then she caught up the
  towel, her face averted-ran back and sprang into the bed and clawed the
  covers to her chin and lay there, listening t6 the secret whisper of her
  blood.
  They knocked at the door for some time before she made any sound. "It's
  the doctor, honey," Miss Reba panted harshly. "Come on, now. Be a good
  girl."
  "I cant." Temple said, her voice faint and small. "I'm in bed."
  "Come on, now. He wants to fix you up." She panted harshly. "My God, if
  I could just get one full breath again. I aint had a full breath since
  . . ." Low down beyond the door Temple could hear the dogs. "Honey."
  She rose from the bed, holding the towel about her. She went to the door,
  silently.
 "Honey," Miss Reba said.
 "Wait," Temple said, "Let me get back to the bed."
  "There's a good girl," Miss Reba said. "I knowed she was going to be
  good."
  "Count ten, now," Temple said. "Will you count ten, now?" she said
  against the wood. She slipped the bolt soundlessly, then she turned and
  sped back to the bed, her naked feet in pattering diminuendo.
  The doctor was a fattish man with thin, curly hair. He wore horn-rimmed
  glasses which lent to his eyes no distortion at all, as though they were
  of clear glass and worn for decorum's sake. Temple watched him across the
  covers, holding them to her throat. "Make them go out," she whispered;
  "if they'll just go out."
 "Now, now," Miss Reba said, "he's going to fix you up."
 Temple clung to t.,.e covers.
 "If the little lady will just letthe doctor said. His
            SANCTUARY             85
 hair evaporated finely from his brow. His mouth nipped in at the corners,
 his lips full and wet and red. Behind the glasses his eyes looked like
 little bicycle wheels at dizzy speed; a metallic hazel. He put out a
 thick, white hand bearing a masonic ring, haired over with fine reddish
 fuzz to the second knuckle-joints. Cold air slipped down her body, below
 her thighs; her eyes were closed. Lying on her back, her legs close
 together, she began to cry, hopelessly and passively, like a child in a
 dentist's waiting room.
  "Now, now," Miss Reba said, "take another sup of gin, honey. It'll make
  you feel better."

  In the window the cracked shade, yawning now and then with a faint rasp
  against the frame, let twilight into the room in fainting surges. From
  beneath the shade the smoke-colored twilight emerged in slow puffs like
  signal smoke from a blanket, thickening in the room. The china figures
  which supported the clock gleamed in hushed smooth flexions: knee, elbow,
  flank, arm and breast in attitudes of voluptuous lassitude. The glass
  face, become mirror-like, appeared to hold all reluctant light, holding
  in its tranquil depths a quiet gesture of moribund time, one-armed like
  a veteran from the wars. Half past ten o'clock. Temple lay in the bed,
  looking at the clock, thinking about half-past-ten-o'clock.
  She wore a too-large gown of cerise crepe, black against the linen. Her
  hair was a black sprawl, combed out now; her face, throat and arms
  outside the covers were gray. After the others left the room. she lay for
  a time, head and all beneath the covers. She lay so until she heard the
  door shut and the descending feet, the doctor's light, unceasing voice
  and Miss Reba's labored breath grow twilight-colored in the dingy hall
  and die away. Then she sprang from the bed and ran to the door and shot
  the bolt and ran back and hurled the covers over her head again, lying
  in a tight knot until the air was exhausted.
  A final saffron-colored light lay upon the ceiling and the upper walls,
  tinged already with purple by the serrated palisade of Main Street high
  against the western sky. She watched it fade as the successive yawns of
  the shade consumed it. She watched the final light condense into the
  clock face, and the dial change from a round orifice in the darkness to
  a disc suspended in nothingness, the original chaos, and change in turn
  to a crystal ball holding in its still and cryptic depths the ordered
  chaos of the intricate and shadowy world upon whose scarred flanks the
  old wounds whirl onward at dizzy speed into darkness lurking with new
  disasters.
 She was thinking about half-past-ten-o'clock. The hour for
 86         WILLIAM FAULKNER

 dressing for a dance, if you were popular enough not to have to be on
 time. The air would be steamy with recent baths, and perhaps powder in the
 light like chaff in barn-lofts, and they looking at one another,
 comparing, talking whether you could do more damage if you could just walk
 out on the floor like you were now. Some wouldn't, mostly ones with short
 legs. Some of them were all right, but they just wouldn't. They wouldn't
 say why. The worst one of all said boys thought all girls were ugly except
 when they were dressed. She said the Snake had been seeing Eve for several
 days and never noticed her until Adam made her put on a fig leaf. How do
 you know? they said, and she said because the Snake was there before Adam,
 because he was the first one thrown out of heaven; he was there all the
 time. But that wasn't what they meant and they said, How do you know? and
 Temple thought of her kind of backed up against the dressing table and the
 rest of them in a circle around her with their combed hair and their
 shoulders smelling of scented soap and the light powder in the air and
 their eyes like knives until you could almost watch her flesh where the
 eyes were touching it, and her eyes in her ugly face courageous and
 frightened and daring, and they all saying, How do you know? until she
 told them and held up her hand and swore she had. That was when the
 youngest one turned and ran out of the room. She locked herself in the
 bath and they could hear her being sick.
  She thought about half-past-ten-o'clock in the morning. Sunday morning,
  and the couples strolling toward church. She remembered it was still
  Sunday, the same Sunday, looking at the fading peaceful gesture of the
  clock. Maybe it was halfpast-ten this morning, that
  half-past-ten-o'clock. Then I'm not here, she thought. This is not me.
  Then I'm at school. I have a date tonight with . . . thinking of the
  student with whom she had th6 date. But she couldn't remember who it
  would be. She kept the dates written down in her Latin 'pony,' so she
  didn't have to bother about who it was. She'd just dress, and after a
  while somebody would call for her. So I better get up and dress, she
  said, looking at the clock.
  She rose and crossed the room quietly, She watched the clock face, but
  although she could see a warped turmoil of faint light and shadow of
  geometric miniature swinging across it, she could not see herself. It's
  this nightie, she thought, looking at her arms, her breast rising out of
  a dissolving pall beneath which her toes peeped in pale, fleet intervals
  as she walked. She drew the bolt quietly and returned to the bed and lay
  with her head cradled in her arms.
  There was still a little light in the room. She found that she was
  hearing her watch; had been hearing it for some time.
            SANCTUARY            87

 She discovered that the house was full of noises, seeping into the room
 muffled and indistinguishable, as though from a distance. A bell rang
 faintly and shrilly somewhere; someone mounted the stairs in a swishing
 garment. The feet went on past the door and mounted another stair and
 ceased. She listened to the watch. A car started beneath the window with a
 grind of gears; again the faint bell rang, shrill and prolonged. She found
 that the faint light yet in the room was from a street lamp. Then she
 realised that it was night and the darkness beyond was full of the sound of
 the city.
  She heard the two dogs come up the stairs in a furious scrabble. The noise
  passed the door and stopped, became utterly still; so still that she could
  almost see them crouching there in the dark against the wall, watching the
  stairs. One of them was named Mister something, Temple thought, waiting to
  hear Miss Reba's feet on the stairs. But it was not Miss Reba; they came
  too steadily and too lightly. The door opened; the dogs surged in in two
  shapeless blurs and scuttled under the bed and crouched, whimpering. "You
  dawgs!" Minnie's voice said. "You make me spill this." The light came on.
  Minnie carried a tray. "I got you some supper," she said. "Where them dawgs
  gone to?"
 "Under the bed," Temple said. "I don't want any."
  Minnie came and set the tray on the bed and looked down at Temple, her
  pleasant face knowing and placid. "You want me to-" she said, extending her
  hand. Temple turned her face quickly away. She heard Minnie kneel, cajoling
  the dogs, the dogs snarling back at her with whimpering, asthmatic snarls
  and clicking teeth. "Come outen there, now," Minnie said. "They know fo
  Miss Reeba do when she fixing to get drunk. You, Mr. Binfordi"
 Temple raised her head. "Mr. Binford?"
  "He the one with the blue ribbon," Minnie said. Stooping, she flapped her
  arm at the dogs. They were backed against the wall at the head of the bed,
  snapping and snarling at her in mad terror. "Mr. Binford was Miss Reba's
  man. Was landlord here eleven years until he die about two years ago. Next
  day Miss Reba get these dawgs, name one Mr. Binford and other Miss Reba.
  Whenever she go to the cemetery she start drinking like this evening, then
  they both got to run. But Mr. Binford ketch it sho nough. Last time she
  throw him outen upstair window and go down and empty Mr. Binford's clothes
  closet and throw everything out in the street except what he buried in."
  "Oh," Temple said. "No wonder they're scared. Let them stay under there.
  They won't bother me."
 "Reckon I have to. Mr. Binford ain't going to leave this
 88         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 room, not if he know it." She stood again, looking at Temple. "Eat that
 supper," she said. "You feel better. I done slip you a drink of gin, too."
  "I don't want any," Temple said, turning her face away. She heard Minnie
  leave the room. The door closed quietly. Under the bed the dogs crouched
  against the wall in that rigid and furious terror.
  The light hung from the center of the ceiling, beneath a fluted shade of
  rose-colored paper browned where the bulb bulged it. The floor was
  covered by a figured maroon-tinted carpet tacked down in strips; the
  olive-tinted walls bore two framed lithographs. From the two windows
  curtains of machine lace hung, dust-colored, like strips of lightly
  congealed dust set on end. The whole room had an air of musty stoginess,
  decorum; in the wavy mirror of a cheap varnished dresser, as in a
  stagnant pool, there seemed to linger spent ghosts of voluptuous gestures
  and dead lusts. In the corner, upon a faded scarred strip of oilcloth
  tacked over the carpet, sat a washstand bearing a flowered bowl and
  pitcher and a row of towels; in the corner behind it sat a slop jar
  dressed also in fluted rose-colored paper.
  Beneath the bed the dogs made no sound. Temple moved slightly; the dry
  complaint of mattress and springs died into the terrific silence in which
  they crouched. She thought of them, woolly, shapeless; savage, petulant,
  spoiled, the flatulent monotony of their sheltered lives snatched up
  without warning by an incomprehensible moment of terror and fear of
  bodily annihilation at the very hands which symbolised by ordinary the
  licensed tranquillity of their lives.
  The house was full of sounds. Indistinguishable, remote, they came to her
  with a quality of awakening, resurgence, as though the house itself had
  been asleep, rousing itself with dark; she heard something which might
  have been a burst of laughter in a shrill woman voice. Steamy odors from
  the tray drifted across her face. She turned her head and looked at it,
  at the covered and uncovered dishes of thick china. In the midst of them
  sat the glass of pale gin, a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches. She
  rose on her elbow, catching up the slipping gown. She lifted the covers
  upon a thick steak, potatoes, green peas; rolls; an anonymous pinkish
  mass which some sense-elimination, perhaps-identified as a sweet. She
  drew the slipping gown up again, thinking about them eating down at
  school in a bright uproar of voices and clattering forks; of her father
  and brothers at the supper table at home; thinking about the borrowed
  gown and Miss Reba saying that they would go shopping tomorrow. And I've
  just got two dollars, she thought.
            SANCTUARY            89
  When she looked at the food she found that she was not hungry at all,
  didn't even want to look at it. She lifted the glass and gulped it empty,
  her face wry, and set it down and turned her face hurriedly from the
  tray, fumbling for the cigarettes. When she went to strike the match she
  looked at the tray again and took up a strip of potato gingerly in her
  fingers and ate it. She ate another, the unlighted cigarette in her other
  hand. Then she put the cigarette down and took up the knife and fork and
  began to eat, pausing from time to time to draw the gown up onto her
  shoulder.
  When she finished eating she lit the cigarette. She heard the bell again,
  then another in a slightly different key. Across a shrill rush of a
  woman's voice a door banged. Two people mounted the stairs and passed the
  door; she heard Miss Reba's voice booming from somewhere and listened to
  her toiling slowly up the stairs. Temple watched the door until it opened
  and Miss Reba stood in it, the tankard in her hand. She now wore a
  bulging house dress and a widow's bonnet with a veil. She entered on the
  flowered felt slippers. Beneath the bed the two dogs made a stifled
  concerted sound of utter despair.
  The dress, unfastened in the back, hung lumpily about Miss Reba's
  shoulders. One ringed hand lay on her breast, the other held the tankard
  high. Her open mouth, studded with goldfillings gaped upon the harsh
  labor of her breathing.
  "Oh God oh God," she said. The dogs surged out from beneath the bed and
  hurled themselves toward the door in a mad scrabble. As they rushed past
  her she turned and flung the tankard at them. It struck the door jamb,
  splashing up the wall, and rebounded with a forlorn clatter. She drew her
  breath whistling, clutching her breast. She came to the bed and looked
  down at Temple through the veil. "We was happy as two doves," she wailed,
  choking, her rings smoldering in hot glints within her billowing breast.
  "Then he had to go and die on me." She drew her breath whistling, her
  mouth gaped, shaping the hidden agony of her thwarted lungs, her eyes
  pale and round with striken bafflement, protuberant. "As two doves," she
  roared in a harsh, choking voice.

  Again time had overtaken the dead gesture behind the clock crystal:
  Temple's watch on the table beside the bed said half-past-ten. For two
  hours she had lain undisturbed, listening. She could distinguish voices
  now from below stairs. She had been hearing them for some time, lying in
  the room's musty isolation. Later a mechanical piano began to play. Now
  and then she heard automobile brakes in the street beneath the window;
  once two voices quarreling bitterly came up and beneath the shade.
 90         WILLIAM FAULKNER
  She heard two people-a man and a woman-mount the stairs and enter the
  room next hers. Then she heard Miss Reba toil up the stairs and pass her
  door, and lying in the bed, her eyes wide and still, she heard Miss Reba
  hammering at the next door with the metal tankard and shouting into the
  wood. Beyond the door the man and woman were utterly quiet, so quiet that
  Temple thought of the dogs again, thought of them crouching against the
  wall under the bed in that rigid fury of terror and despair. She listened
  to Miss Reba's voice shouting hoarsely into the blank wood. It died away
  into terrific gasping, then it rose again in the gross and virile cursing
  of a man. Beyond the wall the man and woman made no sound. Temple lay
  staring at the wall beyond which Miss Reba's voice rose again as she
  hammered at the door with the tankard.
  Temple neither saw nor heard her door when it opened. She just happened
  to look toward it after how long she did not know, and saw Popeye
  standing there, his hat slanted across his face. Still without making any
  sound he entered and shut the door and shot the bolt and came toward the
  bed. As slowly she began to shrink into the bed, drawing the covers up
  to her chin, watching him across the covers. He came and looked down at
  her. She writhed slowly in a cringing movement, cringing upon herself in
  as complete an isolation as though she were bound to a church steeple.
  She grinned at him, her mouth warped over the rigid, placative porcelain
  of her grimace.
  When he put his hand on her she began to whimper. "No, no," she
  whispered, "he said I cant now he said . . ." He jerked the covers back
  and flung them aside. She lay motionless, her palms lifted, her flesh
  beneath the envelope of her loins cringing rearward in furious
  disintegration like frightened people in a crowd. When he advanced his
  hand again she thought he was going to strike her. Watching his face, she
  saw it beginning to twitch and jerk like that of a child about to cry,
  and she heard him begin to make a whimpering sound. He gripped the top
  of the gown. She caught his wrists and began to toss from side to side,
  opening her mouth to scream. His hand clapped over her mouth, and
  gripping his wrist, the saliva drooling between his fingers, her body
  thrashing furiously from thigh to thigh, she saw him crouching beside the
  bed, his face wrung above his absent chin, his bluish lips protruding as
  though he were blowing upon hot soup, making a high whinnying sound like
  a horse. Beyond the wall Miss Reba filled the hall, the house, with a
  harsh choking uproar of obscene cursing.
               x1x

 "BUT THAT GIRL," HORACE SAID. "SHE WAS ALL RIGHT. YOU know she was all
 right when you left the house. When you saw her in the car with him. He
 was just giving her a lift to town. She was all right. You know she was
 all right."
  The woman sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at the child. It lay
  beneath the faded, clean blanket, its hands upflung beside its head, as
  though it had died in the presence of an unbearable agony which had not
  had time to touch it. Its eyes were half open, the balls rolled back into
  the skull so that only the white showed, in color like weak milk. Its
  face was still damp with perspiration, but its breathing was easier. It
  no longer breathed in those weak, whistling gasps as it had when Horace
  entered the room. On a chair beside the bed sat a tumbler half full of
  faintly discolored water, with a spoon in it. Through the open window
  came the myriad noises of the square-cars, wagons, footsteps on the
  pavement beneathand through it Horace could see the courthouse, with men
  pitching dollars back and forth between holes in the earth beneath the
  locust and water Oaks.
  The woman brooded above the child. "Nobody wanted her out there. Lee has
  told them and told them they must not bring women out there, and I told
  her before it got dark they were not her kind of people and to get away
  from there. It was that fellow that brought her. He was out there on the
  porch with them, still drinking, because when he came in to supper he
  couldn't hardly walk, even. He hadn't even tried to wash the blood off
  of his face. Little shirt-tail boys that think because Lee breaks the
  law, they can come out there and treat our house like a . . . Grown
  people are bad, but at least they take buying whiskey like buying
  anything else; it's the ones like him, the ones that are too young to
  realise that people don't break the law just for a holiday." Horace could
  see her clenched hands writhing in h-er lap. "God, if I had my way, I'd
  hang every man that makes it or buys it or drinks it, every one of them.
  "But why must it have been me, us? What had I ever done to her, to her
  kind? I told her to get away from there. I told her not to stay there
  until dark. But that fellow that brought her was getting drunk again, and
  him and Van picking at each other. If she'd just stopped running around
  where they had to look at her. She wouldn't stay anywhere. She'd just
  dash out one door, and in a minute she'd come running in from the other
  direction. And if he'd just let Van alone, because Van had to go back on
  the truck at midnight, and so Popeye would have made him behave. And
  Saturday night too, and them 91
 92         WILLIAM FAULKNER
 sitting up all night drinking anyway, and I had gone through it and gone
 through it and I'd tell Lee to let's get away, that he was getting nowhere,
 and he would have these spells like last night, and no doctor, no telephone.
 And then she had to come out there, after I had slaved for him, slaved for
 him." Motionless, her head bent and her hands still in her lap, she had that
 spent immobility of a chimney rising above the ruin of a house in the
 aftermath of a cyclone.
  "Standing there in the corner behind the bed, with that raincoat on. She
  was that scared, when they brought the fellow in, all bloody again. They
  laid him on the bed and Van hit him again and Lee caught Van's arm, and her
  standing there with her eyes like the holes in one of these masks. The
  raincoat was hanging on the wall, and she had it on, over her coat. Her
  dress was all folded up on the bed. They threw the fellow right on top of
  it, blood and all, and I said 'God, are you drunk too?' But Lee just looked
  at me and I saw that his nose was white already, like it gets when he's
  drunk.
  "There wasn't any lock on the door, but I thought that pretty soon they'd
  have to go and see about the truck and then I could do something. Then Lee
  made me go out too, and he took the lamp out, so I had to wait until they
  went back to the porch before I could go back. I stood just inside the
  door. The fellow was snoring, in the bed there, breathing hard, with his
  nose and mouth all battered up again, and I could hear them on the porch.
  Then they would be outdoors, around the house and at the back too I could
  hear them. Then they got quiet.
  "I stood there, against the wall. He would snore and choke and catch his
  breath and moan, sort of, and I would think about that girt lying there in
  the dark, with her eyes open, listening to them, and me having to stand
  there, waiting for them to go away so I could do something. I told her to
  go away. I said 'What fault is it of mine if you're not married? I don't
  want you here a bit more than you want to be here.' I said 'I've lived my
  life without any help from people of your sort; what right have you got to
  look to me for help?' Because I've done everything for him. I've been in
  the dirt for him. I've put everything behind me and all I asked was to be
  let alone.
  "Then I heard the door open. I could tell Lee by the way he breathes. He
  went to the bed and said 'I want the raincoat. Sit up and take it off' and
  I could hear the shucks rattling while he took it off her, then he went
  out. He just got the raincoat and went out. It was Van's coat.
 "And I have walked around that house so much at night,
            SANCTUARY            93

 with those men there, men living off of Lee's risk, men that wouldn't lift
 a finger for him if he got caught, until I could tell any of them by the way
 they breathed, and I could tell Popeye by the smell of that stuff on his
 hair. Tommy was following him. He came in the door behind Popeye and looked
 at me and I could see his eyes, like a cat. Then his eyes went away and I
 could feel him sort of squatting against me, and we could hear Popeye over
 where the bed was and that fellow snoring and snoring.
  "I could just hear little faint sounds, from the shucks. so I knew it was
  all right yet, and in a minute Popeye carne on back, and Tommy followed him
  out, creeping along behind him, and I stood there until I heard them go
  down to the truck. Then I went to bed. When I touched her she be-an to
  fight. I was trying to put my hand over her mouth so she couldn't make a
  noise, but she didn*t, anyway. She just lay there, thrashing about, rolling
  her head from one side to the other, holding to the coat.
 "'You foolF I says 'It's me-the woman."'
  "But that ,irl," Horace said. "She was all right. When you were coming back
  to the house the next morning after the baby's bottle, you saw her and knew
  she was all right " The room gave onto the square. Through the window he
  Could see the young men pitching dollars in the courthouse yard, and the
  wagons passing or tethered about the hitching chains, and he could hear the
  footsteps and voices of people on the slow and unhurried pavement below the
  window. The peo;-,Ie buying comfortable things to take home and eat at
  quiet tables. "You know she was all right."

  That night Horace went out to his sister's, in a hired car; he did not
  telephone. He found Miss Jenny in her room. "Well," she said. "Narcissa
  will-,,
  "I don't want to see her," Horace said. "Her nice, wellbred young man. Her
  Virginia gentleman. I know why he didn't come back."
 "Who? Gowan?"
  'Yes; Gowan. And, by the Lord, he'd better not come back. By God, when I
  think that I had the opportunity-"
 "What? What did he do?"
  "He carried a little fool girl out there with him that day and got drunk
  and ran off and left her. That's what he did. If it hadn't been for that
  woman-And when I think of `-, c o -ple like that walking the earth with
  impunity just bec-iuse he had a balloon-tailed suit and went through the
  astoni-jong experiencc of having attended Virginia . . . On any train or in
  any hotel, on the street, anywhere, mind you-"
 94         WILLIAM FAULKNER

  "Oh," Miss Jenny said. "I didn't understand at first who you meant.
  Well," she said. "You remember that last time he was here, just after you
  came? the day he wouldn't stay for supper and went to Oxford?"
 "Yes. And when I think I could have-"
  "He asked Narcissa to marry him. She told him that one child was enough
  for her."
  "I said she has no heart. She cannot be satisfied with less than insult."
  "So he got mad and said he would go to Oxford, where there was a woman
  he was reasonably confident he would not appear ridiculous to: something
  like that. Well." She looked at him, her neck bowed to see across her
  spectacles. "I'll declare, a male parent is a funny thing, but just let
  a man have a hand in the affairs of a female that's no kin to him . . .
  What is it that makes a man think that the female flesh he marries or
  begets might misbehave, but all he didn't marry or get is bound to?"
  "Yes," Horace said, "and thank God she isn't my flesh and blood. I can
  reconcile myself to her having to be exposed to a scoundrel now and then,
  but to think that at any moment she may become involved with a fool."
  "Well, what are you going to do about it? Start some kind of roach
  campaign?"
  "I'm going to do what she said; I'm going to have a law passed making it
  obligatory upon everyone to shoot any man less than fifty years old that
  makes, buys, sells or thinks whiskey . . . scoundrel I can face, but to
  think of her being exposed to any fool . . . ...
  He returned to town. The night was warm, the darkness filled with the
  sound of new-fledged cicadas. He was using a bed, one chair, a bureau on
  which he had spread a towel and upon which lay his brushes, his watch,
  his pipe and tobacco pouch, and, propped against a book, a photograph of
  his step-daughter, Little Belle. Upon the glazed surface a highlight lay.
  He shifted the photograph until the face came clear. He stood before it,
  looking at the sweet, inscrutable face which looked in turn at something
  just beyond his shoulder, out of the dead cardboard. He was thinking of
  the grape arbor in Kinston, of summer twilight and the murmur of voices
  darkening into silence as he approached, who meant them, her, no harm;
  who meant her less than harm, good God; darkening into the pale whisper
  of her white dress, of the delicate and urgent mammalian whisper of that
  curious small flesh which he had not begot and in which appeared to be
  vatted delicately some seething sympathy with the blossoming grape.
 He moved, suddenly. As of its own accord the photograph
            SANCTUARY            95
 had shifted, slipping a little from its precarious balancing ag,-inst the
 book. The image blurred into the highlight, like something familiar seen
 beneath disturbed though clear water; he looked at the familiar image with
 a kind of quiet horror and despair, at a face suddenly older in sin than he
 would ever be, a face more blurred than sweet, at eyes more secret than
 soft. In reaching for it, he knocked it flat; whereupon once more the face
 mused tenderly behind the rigid travesty of the painted mouth, contemplating
 something beyond his shoulder. He lay in bed, dressed, with the light
 burning, until he heard the court-house clock strike three. Then he left the
 house, putting his watch and his tobacco pouch into his pocket.
  The railroad station was three quarters of a mile away. The waiting roonli
  was lit by a single weak bulb. It was empty save for a man in overalls
  asleep on a bench, his head on his folded coat, snoring, and a woman in a
  calico dress, in a dingy shawl and a new hat trimmed with rigid and
  moribund flowers set square and awkward on her head. Her head was bent; she
  may have been asleep; her hands crossed on a paper-wrapped parcel upon :ier
  lap, a straw suit case at her feet. It was then that HoL,.ce found he had
  forgot his pipe.
  The train came, finding him tramping back and forth along the cinder-packed
  right-of-way. The man and woman got on, the rnan carrying his rumpled
  co~!t, the woman the parcel and the suit case. He followed thern into the
  day coach filled with snorna, wit'.-i bodies sprawled h~df into the aisle
  as though in the aftermath of a sudden and violent destruction, with
  dropPed lie ds. open-mOLIL:ied, their throats turned profoundly u-)w,-i-,d
  as t'iough waiting the stroke of knives.
  He dozed. The train clicked on, stopped, jolted. He waked and do ied again.
  Someone shook h'm out of sleep into a Primros,~ d:.iwn, zwnon- uns'iaven
  puffy faces washed lightly over as thouo'l with the paling ultimate stain
  of a holocaust, blinking at one another with dead eyes into which
  personality retu,ned in sec-rct opaque waves. He got off, had breakfast,
  and took anot'ier accommodation, entering a car where a c.,fld wailed hol~c
  lessly, crunching peanut-siells under his feet as he moved up t ie car in
  a stale ammoniac odor until he found a seat beside a man. A moment later
  the man leaned forward and s at tob~cco juice between iis knees. Horace
  rose qu*~ckly and wcnt forward into vhc s oking car. It was ful, too, the
  d.)or betw-en it and the jim crow swinging ol)cn. S::,ndino ~,i the aisle
  he Could !ook forward in.o a di
 CC                                'or of ,!-een ~Ius'i se~it b -k:!<s to)
 )ed by hatted can -,on
 balls                             swaying in unison, while ousts of talk
 and lau~:hter New
   i.m, ,. t in s.~,~.dy : -,o.. 71 1 c b, - acrid air in which white men
   sat, spitting into the aisle.
 96         WILLIAM FAULKNER
  He changed again. The waiting crowd was composed half of young men in
  collegiate clothes with small cryptic badges on their shirts and vests, and
  two girls with painted small faces and scant bright dresses like identical
  artificial flowers surrounded each by bright and restless bees. When the
  train came they pushed gaily forward, talking and laughing, shouldering
  aside older people with gay rudeness, clashing and slamming seats back and
  settling themselves, turning their faces up out of laughter, their cold
  faces stfll toothed with it, as three middle-aged women moved down the car,
  looking tentatively left and right at the filled seats.
  The two girls sat together, removing a fawn and a blue hat, lifting slender
  hands and preening not-quite-formless fingers about their close heads seen
  between the sprawled elbows and the leaning heads of two youths hanging
  over the back of the seat and Surrounded by colored hat bands at various
  heights where the owners sat on the seat arms or stood in the aisle; and
  presently the conductor's cap as he thrust among them with plaintive,
  fretful cries, like a bird.
  "Tickets. Tickets, please," he chanted. For an instant they held him there,
  invisible save for his cap. Then two young men slipped swiftly back and
  into the seat behind Horace. He could hear them breathing. Forward the
  conductor's punch clicked twice. He came on back. "Tickets," he chanted,
  "Tickets." He took Horace's and stopped where the youths sat.
 "You already got mine," one said. "Up there."
 "Where's your check?" the conductor said.
  "You never gave us any. You got your tickets, though. Mine was number-" he
  repeated a number glibly, in a frank, pleasant tone. "Did you notice the
  number of yours, Shack?"
  The second one repeated a number in a frank, pleasant tone. "Sure you got
  ours. Look and see." He began to whistle between his teeth, a broken dance
  rhythm, unmusical.
 "Do you eat at Gordon Hall?" the other said.
  "No. I have natural halitosis." The conductor went on. The whistle reached
  crescendo, clapped off by his hands on his knees, ejaculating duh-duh-duh.
  Then he just squalled, meaningless, vertiginous; to Horace it was like
  sitting before a series of printed pages turned in furious snatches '
  leaving a series of cryptic, headless and tailless evocations on the mind.
 "She's travelled a thousand miles without a ticket."
 "Marge too."
 "Beth too."
 "Duh-duh-duh."
 "Marge too."
 "I'm going to punch mine Friday night."
 "Eeeeyow."
            SANCTUARY            97

 "Do you like liver?"
 "I can't reach that far."
 "Eceeeyow."
  They whistled, clapping their heels on the floor to furious crescendo,
  saying duh-duh-duh. The first jolted the seat back against Horace's head.
  He rose. "Come on," he said. "He's done gone." Again the seat jarred into
  Horace and he watched them return and join the group that blocked the
  aisle, saw one of them lay his bold, rough hand flat upon one of the
  bright, soft faces uptilted to them. Beyond the group a countrywoman with
  an infant in her arms stood braced against a seat. From time to time she
  looked back at the blocked aisle and the empty seats beyond.
  At Oxford he descended into a throng of them at the station, hatless, in
  bright dresses, now and then with books in their hands and surrounded
  still by swarms of colored shirts. Impassable, swinging hands with their
  escorts, objects of casual and puppyish pawings, they dawdled up the hill
  toward the college, swinging their little hips, looking at Horace with
  cold, blank eyes as he stepped off the walk in order to pass them.
  At the top of the hill three paths diverged through a broad grove beyond
  which, in green vistas, buildings in red brick or gray stone gleamed, and
  where a clear soprano bell began to ring. The procession became three
  streams, thinning rapidly upon the dawdling couples, swinging hands,
  strolling in crratic surges, lurching into one another with puppyish
  squeals, with the random intense purposelessness of children.
  The broader path led to the postoffice. He entered and waited until the
  window was clear.
  "I'm trying to find a young lady, Miss Temple Drake. I probably just
  missed her, didn't IT'
  "She's not here any longer," the clerk said. "She quit school about two
  weeks ago." He was young: a dull, smooth face behind horn glasses, the
  hair meticulous. After a time Horace heard himself asking quietly:
 "You don't know where she went?"
  The clerk looked at him. He leaned, lowering his voice: "Are you another
  detective?"
  "Yes," Horace said, "yes. No matter. It doesn't matter." Then he was
  walking quietly down the steps, into the sunlight again. He stood there
  while on both sides of him they passed in a steady stream of little
  colored dresses, bare-armed, with close bright heads, with that identical
  cool, innocent, unabashed expression which he knew well in their eyes,
  above the savage identical paint upon their mouths; like music moving,
  like honey poured in sunlight, pagan and evanescent and serene, thinly
  evocative of all lost days and outpaced delights,
 98         WILLIAM FAULKNER

 in the sun. Bright, trembling with heat, it lay in open glades of miragelike
 glimpses of stone or brick: columns without tops, towers apparently floating
 above a green cloud in slow ruin against the southwest wind, sinister,
 imponderable, bland; and he standing there listening to the sweet cloistral
 bell, thinking Now what? What now? and answering himself: Why, nothing.
 Nothing. It's finished.
  He returned to the station an hour before the train was due, a filled but
  unlighted cob pipe in his hand. In the lavatory he saw, scrawled on the
  foul, stained wall, her pencilled name, Temple Drake. He read it quietly,
  his head bent, slowly fingering the unlighted pipe.
  A half hour before the train came they began to gather, strolling down the
  hill and gathering along the platform with thin, bright, raucous laughter,
  their blonde legs monotonous, their bodies moving continually inside their
  scant garments with that awkward and voluptuous purposelessness of the
  young.
  The return train carried a pullman. He went on through the day coach and
  entered it. There was only one other occupant: a man in the center of the
  car, next the window, bareheaded, leaning back, his elbow on the window
  sill and an unlighted cigar in his ringed hand. When the train drew away
  passing the sleek crowds in increasing reverse, the other passenger rose
  and went forward toward the day coach. He carried an overcoat on his arm,
  and a soiled, light-colored felt hat. With the corner of his eye Horace saw
  his hand fumbling at his breast pocket, and he remarked the severe trim of
  hair across the man's vast, soft, white neck. Like with a guillotine,
  Horace thought, watching the man sidle past the porter in the aisle and
  vanish, passing out of his sight and his mind in the act of flinging the
  hat onto his head. The train sped on, swaying on the curves, flashing past
  an occasional house, through cuts and across valleys where young cotton
  wheeled slowly in fanlike rows.
  The train checked speed; a jerk came back, and four whistle-blasts. The man
  in the soiled hat entered, taking a cigar from his breast pocket. He came
  down the aisle swiftly, looking at Horace. He slowed, the cigar in his
  fingers. The train jolted again. The man flung his hand out and caught the
  back of the seat facing Horace.
  "Aint this Judge Benbow?" he said. Horace looked up into a vast, puffy face
  without any mark of age or thought whatever-a majestic sweep of flesh on
  either side of a small blunt nose, like looking out over a mesa, yet withal
  some indefinable quality of delicate paradox, as though the Creator had
  completed his joke by lighting the munificent expenditure
            SANCTUARY            99
 of putty with something originally intended for some weak, acquisitive
 creature like a squirrel or a rat. "Dont I address Judge Benbow?" he said,
 offering his hand. "I'm Senator Snopes, Cla'ence Snopes."
  "Oh," Horace said, "yes. Thanks," he said, "but I'm afraid you anticipate
  a little. Hope, rather."
  The other waved the cigar, the other hand, palm-up, the third finger
  discolored faintly at the base of a huge ring, in Horace's face. Horace
  shook it and freed his hand. "I thought I recognised you when you got on at
  Oxford," Snopes said, "but I-May I sit down?" he said, already shoving at
  Horace's knee with his leg. He flung the overcoat-a shoddy blue garment
  with a greasy velvet collar--on the seat and sat down as the train stopped.
  "Yes, sir, I'm always glad to see any of the boys, any time . . ." He
  leaned across Horace and peered out the window at a small dingy station
  with its cryptic bulletin board chalked over, an express truck bearing a
  wire chicken coop containing two forlorn fowls, at three or four men in
  overalls gone restfully against the wall, chewing. " 'Course you aint in my
  county no longer, but what I say a man's friends is his friends, whichever
  way they vote. Because a friend is a friend and whether he can do anything
  for me or not . . ." He leaned back, the unlighted cigar in his fingers.
  "You aint come all the way up from the big town, then."
 "No," Horace said.
  "Anytime you're in Jackson, I'll be glad to accommodate you as if you was
  still in my county. Dont no man stay so busy he aint got time for his old
  friends, what I say. Let's see, you're in Kinston, now, aint you? I know
  your senators. Fine men, both of them, but I just caint call their names."
  "I really couldn't say, myself," Horace said. The train started. Snopes
  leaned into the aisle, looking back. His light gray suit had been pressed
  but not cleaned. "Well," he said. He rose and took up the overcoat. "Any
  time you're in the city . . . You going to Jefferson, I reckon?"
 "Yes," Horace said.
 "I'll see you again, then."
  "Why not ride back here?" Horace said. "You'll find it more comfortable."
  "I'm going up and have a smoke," Snopes said, waving his cigar. "I'll see
  you again."
 "You can smoke here. There aren't any ladies."
  "Sure," Snopes said. "I'll see you at Holly Springs." He went on back
  toward the day coach and passed out of sight with the cigar in his mouth.
  Horace remembered him ten years ago as a hulking, dull youth, son of a
  restaurant-owner, member of a family which had been moving from the
  Frenchman's
 100        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 Bend neighborhood into Jefferson for the past twenty years, in sections; a
 family of enough ramifications to have elected him to the legislature
 without recourse to a public polling.
  He sat quite still, the cold pipe in his hand. He rose and went forward
  through the day coach, then into the smoker. Snopes was in the aisle, his
  thigh draped over the arm of a seat where four men sat, using the unlighted
  cigar to gesture with. Horace caught his eye and beckoned from the
  vestibule. A moment later Snopes joined him, the overcoat on his arm.
 "How are things going at the capital?" Horace said.
  Snopes began to speak in his harsh, assertive voice. There emerged
  gradually a picture of stupid chicanery and petty corruption for stupid and
  petty ends, conducted principally in hotel rooms into which bellboys
  whisked with bulging jackets upon discreet flicks of skirts in swift closet
  doors. "Anytime you're in town," he said. "I always like to show the boys
  around. Ask anybody in town; they'll tell you if it's there. Cla'ence
  Snopes'll know where it is. You got a pretty tough case up home there, what
  I hear."
  "Cant tell yet," Horace said. "I stopped off at Oxford today, at the
  university, speaking to some of my step-daughter's friends. One of her best
  friends is no longer in school there. A young lady from Jackson named
  Temple Drake."
  Snopes was watching him with thick, small, opaque eyes. "Oh, yes; Judge
  Drake's gal," he said. "The one that ran away."
  "Ran away?" Horace said. "Ran back home, did she? What was the trouble?
  Fail in her work?"
  "I dont know. When it come out in the paper folks thought she'd run off
  with some fellow. One of them companionate marriages."
  "But when she turned up at home, they knew it wasn't that, I reckon. Well,
  well, Belle'll be surprised. What's she doing now? Running around Jackson,
  I suppose?"
 "She aint there."
  "Not?" Horace said. He could feel the other watching him. "Where is she?"
  "Her paw sent her up north somewhere, with an aunt. Michigan. It was in the
  papers couple days later."
  "Oh," Horace said. He still held the cold pipe, and he discovered his hand
  searching his pocket for a match. He drew a deep breath. "That Jackson
  paper's a pretty good paper. It's considered the most reliable paper in the
  state, isn't it?"
  "Sure," Snopes said. "You was at Oxford trying to locate her?"
  "No, no. I just happened to meet a friend of my daughter who told me she
  had left school. Well, I'll see you at Holly Springs."
                        SANCTUARY           101
  "Sure," Snopes said. Horace returned to the pullman and sat down and lit
  the pipe.
  When the train slowed for Holly Springs he went to the vestibule, then
  he stepped quickly back into the car. Snopes emerged from the day coach
  as the porter opened the door and swung down the step, stool in hand.
  Snopes descended. He took something from his breast pocket and gave it
  to the porter. "Here, George," he said, "have a cigar."
  Horace descended. Snopes went on, the soiled hat towering half a head
  above any other. Horace looked at the porter.
 "He gave it to you, did he?"
  The porter chucked the cigar on his palm. He put it in his pocket.
 "What're you going to do with it?" Horace said.
 "I wouldn't give it to no-body I know," the porter said.
 "Does he do this very often?"
  "Three-four times a year. Seems like I always git him, too . . . Thank'
  suh."
  Horace saw Snopes enter the waiting-room; the soiled hat, the vast neck,
  passed again out of his mind. He filled the pipe again.
  From a block away he heard the Memphis-bound train come in. It was at the
  platform when he reached the station. Beside the open vestibule Snopes
  stood, talking with two youths in new straw hats, with something vaguely
  mentorial. about his thick shoulders and his gestures. The train
  whistled. The two youths got on. Horace stepped back around the comer of
  the station.
  When his train came he saw Snopes get on ahead of him and enter the
  smoker. Horace knocked out his pipe and entered the day coach and found
  a seat at the rear, facing backward.

               XX

 AS HORACE WAS LEAVING THE STATION AT JEFFERSON A TOWNward-bound car slowed
 beside him. It was the taxi which he used to go out to his sister's. "I'll
 give you a ride, this time," the driver said.
  "Much obliged," Horace said. He got in. When the car entered the square,
  the courthouse clock said only twenty minutes past eight, yet there was
  no light in the hotel room window. "Maybe the child's asleep," Horace
  said. He said, "If you'll just drop me at the hotel-" Then he found that
  the driver was watching him, with a kind of discreet curiosity.
 "You been out of town today," the driver said.
  "Yes," Horace said. "What is it? What happened here today?"
 102        WILLIAM FAULKNER

  "She aint staying at the hotel anymore. I heard Mrs. Walker taken her in at
  the jail."
 "Oh," Horace said. "I'll get out at the hotel."
  The lobby was empty. After a moment the proprietor appeared: a tight,
  iron-gray man with a toothpick, his vest open upon a neat paunch. The woman
  was not there. "It's these church ladies," he said. He lowered his voice,
  the toothpick in his fingers. "They come in this morning. A committee of
  them. You know how it is, I reckon."
  "You mean to say you let the Baptist church dictate who your guests shall
  be?"
  "It's them ladies. You know how it is, once they get set on a thing. A man
  might just as well give up and do like they say. Of course, with rne-"
 "By God, if there was a man-"
  "Shhhhhh," the proprietor said. 'You know how it is when them-"
  "But of course there wasn't a man who would- And you call yourself one,
  that'll let-"
  "I got a certain position to keep up myself," the proprietor said in a
  placative tone. "If you come right down to it." He stepped back a little,
  against the desk. "I reckon I can say who'll stay in my house and who
  won't," he said. "And I know some more folks around here that better do the
  same thing. Not no mile off, neither. I ain't beholden to no man. Not to
  you, noways."
 "Where is she now? or did they drive her out of town?"
  "That ain't my affair, where folks go after they check out," the proprietor
  said, turning his back. He said: "I reckon somebody took her in, though."
  "Yes," Horace said. "Christians. Christians." He turned toward the door.
  The proprietor called him. He turned. The other was taking a paper down
  from a pigeon-hole. Horace returned to the desk. The paper Jay on the desk.
  The proprietor leaned with his hands on the desk, the toothpick tilted in
  his mouth.
 "She said you'd pay it," he said.
  He paid the bill, counting the money down with shaking hands. He entered
  the jail yard and went to the door and knocked. After a while a lank,
  slattern woman came with a lamp, holding a man's coat across her breast.
  She peered at him and said before he could speak:
 "You're lookin' fer Miz Goodwin, I reckon."
 "Yes. How did- Did-"
  "You're the lawyer. I've seed you befo. She's hyer. Sleepin' now."
  "Thanks," Horace said, "Thanks. I knew that someone I didn't believe that-"
            SANCTUARY           103
  "I reckon I kin always find a bed fer a woman and child," the woman said,
  "I don't keer whut Ed says. Was you wantin' her special? Stie's sleepin'
  now."
 "No, no; I just wanted to-"
  The woman watched him across the lamp. "'Tain't no need botherin' her,
  then. You kin come around in the mawnin' and git her a boa'din-place.
  'Tain't no hurry."
  On the next afternoon Horace went out to his sister's, again in a hired
  car. He told her what had happened. "I'll have to take her home now."
 "Not into my house," Narcissa said.
  He looked at her. Then he began to fill his pipe slowly and carefully.
  "It's not a matter of choice, my dear. You must see that."
  "Not in my house," Narcissa said. "I thought we settled that."
  He struck the match and lit the pipe and put the match carefully into the
  fireplace. "Do you realise that she has been practically turned into the
  streets? That-"
 "That shouldn't be a hardship. She ought to be used to that."
  He looked at her. He put the pipe in his mouth and smoked it to a careful
  coal, watching his hand tremble upon the stem. "Listen. By tomorrow they
  will probably ask her to leave town. Just because she happens not to be
  married to the man whose child she carries about these sanctified
  streets. But who told them? That's what I want to know. I know that
  nobody in Jefferson knew it except-"
  "You were the first I heard tell it," Miss Jenny said. "But, Narcissa,
  why-"
 "Not in my house," Narcissa said.
  "Well," Horace said. He drew the pipe to an even coal. "That settles it,
  of course," he said, in a dry, light voice.
 She rose. "Will you stay here tonight?"
  "What? No. No. I'll-I told her I'd come for her at the jail and . . ."
  He sucked his pipe. "Well, I don't suppose it matters. I hope it
  doesn't."
 She was still paused, turning. "Will you stay or not?"
  "I could even tell her I had a puncture," Horace said. "Time's not such
  a bad thing after all. Use it right, and you can stretch anything out,
  like a rubber band, until it busts somewhere, and there you are, with all
  tragedy and despair in two little knots between thumb and finger of each
  hand."
 "Will you stay, or won't you stay, Horace?" Narcissa said.
 "I think IT stay," Horace said.
  He was in bed. He had been lying in the dark for about an hour, when the
  door of the room opened, felt rather than seen or heard. It was his
  sister. He rose to his elbow. She took
 104        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 shape vaguely, approaching the bed. She came and looked down at him. "How
 much longer are you going to keep this up?" she said.
  "Just until morning," he said. "I'm going back to town. You need not see
  me again."
  She stood beside the bed, motionless. After a moment her cold unbending
  voice came down to him: "You know what I mean."
  "I promise not to bring her into your house again. You can send Isom in
  to hide in the canna bed." She said nothing. "Surely you don't object to
  my living there, do you?"
  "I dont care where you live. The question is, where I live. I live here,
  in this town. I'll have to stay here. But you're a man. It doesn't matter
  to you. You can go away."
  "Oh," he said. He lay quite still. She stood above him, motionless. They
  spoke quietly, as though they were discussing wall-paper, food.
  "Don't you see, this is my home, where I must spend the rest of my life.
  Where I was born. I dont care where else you go nor what you do. I dont
  care how many women you have nor who they are. But I cannot have my
  brother mixed up with a woman people are talking about. I don't expect
  you to have consideration for me; I ask you to have consideration for our
  father and mother. Take her to Memphis. They say you refused to let the
  man have bond to get out of jail; take her on to Memphis. You can think
  of a lie to tell him about that, too."
 "Oh. So you think that, do you?"
  "I dont think anything about it. I dont care. That's what people in town
  think. So it doesn't matter whether it's true or not. What I do mind is,
  everyday you force me to have to tell lies for you. Go away from here,
  Horace. Anybody but you would realise it's a case of cold-blooded
  murder."
  "And over her, of course. I suppose they say that too, out of their
  odorous and omnipotent sanctity. Do they say yet that it was I killed
  him?"
  "I dont see that it makes any difference who did it. The question is, are
  you going to stay mixed up with it? When people already believe you and
  she are slipping into my house at night." Her cold, unbending voice
  shaped the words in the darkness above hiru. Through the window, upon the
  blowing darkness came the drowsy dissonance of cicada and cricket.
 "Do you believe that?" he said.
  "It doesn't matter what I believe. Go on away, Horace. I ask it."
 "And leave her-them, flat?"
 "Hire a lawyer, if he still insists he's innocent. I'll pay for
            SANCTUARY           105
 it. You can get a better criminal lawyer than you are. She wont know it.
 She wont even care. Cant you see that she is just leading you on to get
 him out of jail for nothing? Dont you know that woman has got money hidden
 away somewhere? You're going back into town tomorrow, are you?" She
 turned, began to dissolve into the blackness. "You wont leave before
 breakfast."

  The next morning at breakfast, his sister said: "Who will be the lawyer
  on the other side of the case?"
 "District Attorney. Why?"
  She rang the bell and sent for fresh bread. Horace watched her. "Why do
  you ask that?" Then he said: "Damn little squirt." He was talking about
  the district attorney, who had also been raised in Jefferson and who had
  gone to the town school with them. "I believe he was at the bottom of
  that business night before last. The hotel. Getting her turned out of the
  hotel for public effect, political capital. By God, if I knew that,
  believed that he had done that just to get elected to Congress . . ."
  After Horace left, Narcissa went up to Miss Jenny's room. "Who is the
  District Attorney?" she said.
  "You've known him all your life," Miss Jenny said. "You even elected him.
  Eustace Graham. What do you want to know for? Are you looking around for
  a substitute for Gowan Stevens?"
 "I just wondered," Narcissa said.
  "Fiddlesticks," Miss Jenny said. "You dont wonder. You just do things and
  then stop until the next time to do something comes around."
  Horace met Snopes emerging from the barbershop, his jowls gray with
  powder, moving in an effluvium of pomade. In the bosom of his shirt,
  beneath his bow tie, he wore an imitation ruby stud which matched his
  ring. The tie was of blue polka-dots; the very white spots on it appeared
  dirty when seen close; the whole man with his shaved neck and pressed
  clothes and gleaming shoes emanated somehow the idea that he had been
  dry-cleaned rather than washed.
  "Well, Judge," he said, "I hear you're having some trouble gittin a
  boarding-place for that client of yourn. Like I always say-" he leaned,
  his voice lowered, his mud-colored eyes roving aside "-the church aint
  got no place in politics, and women aint got no place in neither one, let
  alone the law. Let them stay at home and they'll find plenty to do
  without upsetting a man's law-suit. And besides, a man aint no more than
  human, and what he does aint nobody's business but his. What you done
  with her?"
 106        WILLIAM FAULKNER
  "She's at the jail," Horace said. He spoke shortly, making to pass on.
  The other blocked his way with an effect of clumsy accident.
  "You got them all stirred up, anyhow. Folks is saying you wouldn't git
  Goodwin no bond, so he'd have to stay-" again Horace made to pass on.
  "Half the trouble in this world is caused by women, I always say. Like
  that girl gittin' her paw all stirred up, running off like she done. I
  reckon he done the right thing sending her clean outen the state."
 "Yes," Horace said in a dry, furious voice.
  "I'm mighty glad to hear your case is going all right. Between you and
  me, I'd like to see a good lawyer make a monkey outen that District
  Attorney. Give a fellow like that a little county office and he gits too
  big for his pants right away. Well, glad to've saw you. I got some
  business up town for a day or two. I dont reckon you'll be going up
  that-a-way?"
 "What?" Horace said. "Up where?"
 "Memphis. Anything I can do for you?"
  "No," Horace said. He went on. For a short distance he could not see at
  all. He tramped steadily, the muscles beside his jaws beginning to ache,
  passing people who spoke to him, unawares.
               XXI

 AS THE TRAIN NEARED MEMPHIS VIRGIL SNOPES CEASED TALKing and began to grow
 quieter and quieter, while on the contrary his companion, eating from a
 paraffin-paper package of popcorn and molasses, grew livelier and livelier
 with a quality something like intoxication, seeming not to notice the
 inverse state of his friend. He was still talking away when, carrying
 their new, imitation leather suit cases, their new hats slanted above
 their shaven necks, they descended at the station. In the waiting room
 Fonzo said:
  "Well, what're we going to do first?" Virgil said nothing. Someone
  jostled them. Fonzo caught at his haI. "What we going to do?" he said.
  Then he looked at Virgil, at his face. "What's the matter?"
 "Aint nothing the matter," Virgil said.
  "Well, what're we going to do? You been here before. I aint."
 "I reckon we better kind of look around," Virgil said.
  Fonzo was watching him, his blue eyes like china. "What's the matter with
  you? All the time on the train you was talking about how many times you
  been to Memphis. I bet you aint never bu-" Someone jostled them, thrust
  them apart; a stream of people began to flow between them. Clutching his
  suit case and hat Fonzo fought his way back to his friend.
            SANCTUARY            107
 "I have, too," Virgil said, looking glassily about.
  "Well, what we going to do then? It wont be open till eight o'clock in the
  morning."
 "What you in such a rush for, then?"
  "Well, I dont aim to stay here all night.... What did you do when you was
  here before?"
 "Went to the hotel," Virgil said.
  "Which one? They got more than one here. You reckon all these folks could
  stay in one hotel? Which one was it?"
  Virgil's eyes were also a pale, false blue. He looked glassily about. "The
  Gayoso hotel," he said.
  "Well, let's go to it," Fonzo said. They moved toward the exit. A man
  shouted "taxi" at them; a redcap tried to take Fonzo's bag. "Look out," he
  said, drawing it back. On the street more cabmen barked at them.
  "So this is Memphis," Fonzo said. "Which way is it, now?" He had no answer.
  He looked around and saw Virgil in the act of turning away from a cabman.
  "What you-"
 "Up this way," Virgil said. "It aint far."
  It was a mile and a half. From time to time they swapped hands with the
  bags. "So this is Memphis," Fonzo said. "Where have I been all my life?"
  When they entered the Gayoso a porter offered to take the bags. They
  brushed past him and entered, walking gingerly on the tile floor. Virgil
  stopped.
 "Come on," Fonzo said.
 "Wait," Virgil said.
 "Thought you was here before," Fonzo said.
  "I was. This hyer place is too high. They'll want a dollar a day here."
 "What are we going to do, then?"
 "Let's kind of look around."
  They returned to the street. It was five o'clock. They went on, looking
  about, carrying the suit cases. They came to another hotel. Looking in they
  saw marble, brass cuspidors, hurrying bellboys, people sitting among potted
  plants.
 "That un'll be just as bad," Virgil said.
  "What we going to do then? We caint walk around all night."
  "Let's git off this hyer street," Virgil said. They left Main Street. At
  the next corner Virgil turned again. "Let's look down this-a-way. Git away
  from all that ere plate glass and monkey niggers. That's what you have to
  pay for in them places."
  "Why? It's already bought when we got there. How come we have to pay for
  it?"
 "Suppose somebody broke it while we was there. Suppose
 108        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 they couldn't ketch who done it. Do you reckon they'd let us out withouten
 we paid our share?"
  At five-thirty they entered a narrow dingy street of frame houses and junk
  yards. Presently they came to a three storey house in a small grassless
  yard. Before the entrance a latticework false entry leaned. On the steps
  sat a big woman in a mother hubbard, watching two fluffy dogs which moved
  about the yard.
 "Let's try that un," Fonzo said.
 "That aint no hotel. Where's ere sign?"
  "Why aint it? Fonzo said. "'Course it is. Who ever heard of anybody just
  living in a three storey house?"
  "We can't go in this-a-way," Virgil said. "This hyer's the back. Don't you
  see that privy?" jerking his head toward the lattice.
  "Well, let's go around to the front, then," Fonzo said. "Come on."
  They went around the block. The opposite side was filled by a row of
  automobile salesrooms. They stood in the middle of the block, their suit
  cases in their right hands.
 "I dont believe you was ever here before," Fonzo said.
 "Let's go back. That must a been the front."
 "With the privy built onto the front door?" Fonzo said.
 "We can ask that lady."
 "Who can? I aint."
 "Let's go back and see, anyway."
 They returned. The woman and the dogs were gone.
 "Now you done it," Fonzo said. "Aint you?"
 "Let's wait a while. Maybe she'll come back."
 "It's almost seven o'clock," Fonzo said.
  They set the bags down beside the fence. The lights had come on, quivering
  high in the serried windows against the tall serene western sky.
 "I can smell ham, too," Fonzo said.
  A cab drew up. A plump blonde woman got out, followed by a man. They
  watched them go up the walk and enter the lattice. Fonzo sucked his breath
  across his teeth. "Durned if they didn't," he whispered.
 "Maybe it's her husband," Virgil said.
 Fonzo picked up his bag. "Come on."
 "Wait," Virgil said, "Give them a little time."
  They waited. The man came out and got in the cab and went away.
  "Caint be her husband," Fonzo said. "I wouldn't a never left. Come on." He
  entered the gate.
 "Wait," Virgil said.
 "You can," Fonzo said. Virgil took his bag and followed.
            SANCTUARY           109
 He stopped while Fonzo opened the lattice gingerly and peered in. "Aw,
 hell," he said. He entered. There was another door, with curtained glass.
 Fonzo knocked.
  "Why didn't you push that ere button?" Virgil said. "Dont you know city
  folks dont answer no knock?"
  "All right," Fonzo said. He rang the bell. The door opened. It was the
  woman in the mother hubbard; they could hear the dogs behind her.
 "Got ere extra room?" Fonzo said.
  Miss Reba looked at them, at their new hats and the suit cases.
 "Who sent you here?" she said.
  "Didn't nobody. We just picked it out." Miss Reba looked at him. "Them
  hotels is too high."
 Miss Reba breathed harshly. "What you boys doing?"
  "We come hyer on business," Fonzo said. "We aim to stay a good spell."
 "if it aint too high," Virgil said.
 Miss Reba looked at him. "Where you from, honey?"
  They told her, and their names. "We aim to be hyer a month or more, if it
  suits us."
  "Why, I reckon so," she said after a while. She looked at them. "I can let
  you have a room, but I'll have to charge you extra whenever you do business
  in it. I got my living to make like everybody else."
 "We aint, we'll do our business at the college," Fonzo said.
 "What college?" Miss Reba said.
 "The barber's college," Fonzo said.
  "Look here," Miss Reba said, "you little whipper-snapper." Then she began
  to laugh, her hand at her breast. They watched her soberly while she
  laughed in harsh gasps. "Lord, Lord," she said. "Come in here."
  The room was at the top of the house, at the back. Miss Reba showed them
  the bath. When she put her hand on the door a woman's voice said: "Just a
  minute, dearie" and the door opened and she passed them, in a kimono. They
  watched her go up the hall, rocked a little to their young foundations by
  a trail of scent which she left. Fonzo nudged Virgil surreptitiously. In
  their room again he said:
  "That was another one. She's got two daughters. Hold me, big boy; I'm
  heading for the henhouse."
  They didn't go to sleep for some time that first night, what with the
  strange bed and room and the voices. They could hear the city, evocative
  and strange, imminent and remote; threat and promise both-a deep, steady
  sound upon which invisible lights glittered and wavered: colored coiling
  shapes of splendor in which already women were beginning to move
 110        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 in suave attitudes of new delights and strange nostalgic promises. Fonzo
 thought of himself surrounded by tier upon tier of drawn shades,
 rose-colored, beyond which, in a murmur of silk, in panting whispers, the
 apotheosis of his youth assumed a thousand avatars. Maybe it'll begin
 tomorrow, he thought; maybe by tomorrow night . . . A crack of light came
 over the top of the shade and sprawled in a spreading fan upon the ceiling.
 Beneath the window he could hear a voice, a woman's, then a man's: they
 blended, murmured; a door closed. Someone came up the stairs in swishing
 garments, on the swift hard heels of a woman.
  He began to hear sounds in the house: voices, laughter; a mechanical piano
  began to play. "Hear them?" he whispered.
  "She's got a big family, I reckon," Virgil said, his voice already dull
  with sleep.
 "Family, hell," Fonzo said. "It's a party. Wish I was to it."
  On the third day as they were leaving the house in the morning, Miss Reba
  met them at the door. She wanted to use their room in the afternoons while
  they were absent. There was to be a detectives' convention in town and
  business would look up some, she said. "Your things'R be all right. I'll
  have Minnie lock everything up beforehand. Aint nobody going to steal
  nothing from you in my house."
  "What business you reckon she's in?" Fonzo said when they reached the
  street.
 "Don't know," Virgil said.
  "Wish I worked for her, anyway," Fonzo said. "With aH them women in kimonos
  and such running around."
  "Wouldn't do you no good," Virgil said. "They're all married. Aint you
  heard them?"
  The next afternoon when they returned from the school they found a woman's
  undergarment under the washstand . . . Fonzo picked it up. "She's a
  dress-maker," he said.
  "Reckon so," Virgil said. "Look and see if they taken anything of yourn."
  The house appeared to be filled with people who did not sleep at night at
  all. They could hear them at all hours, running up and down the stairs, and
  always Fonzo would be conscious of women, of female flesh. It got to where
  he seemed to lie in his celibate bed surrounded by women, and he would lie
  beside the steadily snoring Virgil, his ears strained for the murmurs, the
  whispers of silk that came through the walls and the floor, that seemed to
  be as much a part of both as the planks and the plaster, thinking that he
  had been in Memphis ten days, yet the extent of his acquaintance was a few
  of his fellow pupils at the school. After Virgil was asleep he would rise
  and unlock the door and leave it ajar, but nothing happened.
            SANCTUARY           ill
  On the twelfth day he told Virgil they were going visiting, with one of
  the barber-students.
 "Where?" Virgil said.
  "That's all right. You come on. I done found out something. And when I
  think I been here two weeks without knowing about it-"
 "What's it going to cost?" Virgil said.
  "When'd you ever have any fun for nothing?" Fonzo said. "Come on."
  "I'll go," Virgil said. "But I aint going to promise to spend nothing."
 "You wait and say that when we get there," Fonzo said.
  The barber took them to a brothel. When they came out Fonzo said, "And
  to think I been here two weeks without ever knowing about that house."
  "I wisht you hadn't never learned," Virgil said. "It cost three dollars."
 "Wasn't it worth it?" Fonzo said.
  "Aint nothing worth three dollars you caint tote off with you," Virgil
  said.
  When they reached home Fonzo stopped. "We got to sneak in now," he said.
  "If she was to find out where we been and what we been doing, she might
  not let us stay in the house with them ladies no more."
  "That's so," Virgil said. "Durn you. Hyer you done made me spend three
  dollars, and now you fixing to git us both throwed out."
  "You do like I do," Fonzo said. 'That's all you got to do. Don't say
  nothing."
  Minnie let them in. The piano was going full blast. Miss Reba appeared
  in a door, with a tin cup in her hand. "Well, well," she said, "you boys
  been out mighty late tonight."
  "Yessum," Fonzo said, prodding Virgil toward the stairs. "We been to
  prayer-meeting." .
 In bed, in the dark, they could still hear the piano.
 "You made me spend three dollars," Virgil said.
  "Aw, shut up," Fonzo said. "When I think I been here for two whole weeks
  almost . . ."
  The next afternoon they came home through the dusk with the lights
  winking on, beginning to flare and gleam, and the women on their
  twinkling blonde legs meeting men and getting into automobiles and such.
 "How about that three dollars now?" Fonzo said.
  "I reckon we better not go over night," Virgil said. "It'll cost too
  much."
  "That's right," Fonzo said. "Somebody might see us and tell her."
 112        WILLIAM FAULKNER

  They waited two nights. "Now it'll be six dollars," Virgil said.
 "Dont come, then," Fonzo said.
  When they returned home Fonzo said: "Try to act like something, this time.
  She near about caught us before on account of the way you acted."
  "What if she does?" Virgil said in a sullen voice. "She caint eat us."
 They stood outside the lattice, whispering.
 "How you know she caint?" Fonzo said.
 "She dont want to, then."
 "How you know she dont want to?"
  "Maybe she dont," Virgil said. Fonzo opened the lattice door. "I caint eat
  that six dollars, noways," Virgil said. "Wisht I could."
  Minnie let them in. She said: "Somebody huntin you all." They waited in the
  hall.
  "We done caught now," Virgil said. "I told you about throwing that money
  away."
 "Aw, shut up," Fonzo said.
  A man emerged from a door, a big man with his hat cocked over one ear, his
  arm about a blonde woman in a red dress. "There's Cla'ence," Virgil said.
  In their room Clarence said: "How'd you get into this place?"
  "Just found it," Virgil said. They told him about it. He sat on the bed, in
  his soiled hat, a cigar in his fingers.
  "Where you been tonight?" he said. They didn't answer. They looked at him
  with blank, watchful faces. "Come on. I know. Where was it?" They told him.
 "Cost me three dollars, too," Virgil said.
  "I'll be durned if you aint the biggest fool this side of Jackson,"
  Clarence said. "Come on here." They followed sheepishly. He led them from
  the house and for three or four blocks. They crossed a street of negro
  stores and theatres and turned into a narrow, dark street and stopped at a
  house with red shades in the lighted windows. Clarence rang the bell. They
  could hear music inside, and shrill voices, and feet. They were admitted
  into a bare hallway where two shabby negro men argued with a drunk white
  man in greasy overalls. Through an open door they saw a room filled with
  coffeecolored women in bright dresses, with ornate hair and golden smiles.
  "Them's niggers," Virgil said.
  " 'Course they're niggers," Clarence said. "But see this?" he waved a
  banknote in his cousin's face. "This stuff is colorblind."
               XXII

 ON THE THIRD DAY OF HIS SEARCH, HORACE FOUND A DOMICILE for the woman and
 child. It was in the ramshackle house of an old half-crazed white woman who
 was believed to manufacture spells for negroes. It was on the edge of town,
 set in a tiny plot of ground choked and massed with waist-high herbage in an
 unbroken jungle across the front. At the back a path had been trodden from
 the broken gate to the door. All night a dim light burned in the crazy
 depths of the house and at almost any hour of the twenty-four a wagon or a
 buggy might be seen tethered in the lane behind it and a negro entering or
 leaving the back door.
  The house had been entered once by officers searching for whiskey. They
  found nothing save a few dried bunches of weeds, and a collection of dirty
  bottles containing liquid of which they could say nothing surely save that
  it was not alcoholic, while the old woman, held by two men, her lank
  grayish hair shaken before the glittering collapse of her face, screamed
  invective at them in her cracked voice. In a lean-to shed room containing
  a bed and a barrel of anonymous refuse and trash in which mice rattled alI
  night long, the woman found a home.
  "You'll be all right here," Horace said. "You can always get me by
  telephone, at-" giving her the name of a neighbor. "No: wait; tomorrow I'll
  have the telephone put back in. Then you can-"
  "Yes," the woman said. "I reckon you better not be coming out here."
  "Why? Do you think that would-that I'd care a damn what-"
 "You have to live here."
  "I'm damned if I do. I've already let too many women run my affairs for me
  as it is, and if these uxorious . . ." But he knew he was just talking. He
  knew that she knew it too, out of that feminine reserve of unflagging
  suspicion of all peoples' actions which seems at first to be mere affinity
  for evil but which is in reality practical wisdom.
  "I guess IT find you if there's any need," she said. "There's not anything
  else I could do."
  "By God," Horace said, "don't you let them . . . Bitches," he said;
  "bitches."
  The next day he had the telephone installed. He did not see his sister for
  a week; she had no way of learning that he had a phone, yet when, a week
  before the opening of Court, the telephone shrilled into the quiet where he
  sat reading one evening, he thought it was Narcissa until, across a remote
  113
 114        WILLIAM FAULKNER

 blaring of victrola or radio music, a man's voice spoke in a guarded,
 tornblike tone.
 "This is Snopes," he said. "How're you, Judge?"
 "What?" Horace said. "Who is it?"
  "Senator Snopes, Cla'ence Snopes." The victrola blared, faint, far away; he
  could see the man, the soiled hat, the thick shoulders, leaning above the
  instrument-in a drugstore or a rest a u rant-wh ispe ring into it behind a
  soft, huge, ringed hand, the telephone toylike in the other.
 "Oh," Horace said. "Yes? What is it?"
 "I got a piece of information that might interest you."
 "Information that would interest me?"
  "I reckon so. That would interest a couple of parties." Against Horace's
  ear the radio or the victrola performed a reedy arpeggio of saxophones.
  Obscene, facile, they seemed to be quarreling with one another like two
  dexterous monkeys in a cage. He could hear the gross breathing of the man
  at the other end of the wire.
  "All right," he said. "What do you know that would interest me?"
 "I'll let you judge that."
  "All right. I'll be down town in the morning. You can find me somewhere."
  Then he said immediately: "Hello!" The man sounded as though he were
  breathing in Horace's ear: a placid, gross sound, suddenly portentous
  somehow. "Hello!" Horace said.
  "It evidently dont interest you, then. I reckon I'll dicker with the other
  party and not trouble you no more. Goodbye."
 "No; wait," Horace said. "Hello! Hello!"
 "Yeuh?"
 "I'll come down tonight. I'll be there in about fifteen-"
  " 'Taint no need of that," Snopes said. "I got my car. IT drive up there."
  He walked down to the gate. There was a moon tonight. Within the
  black-and-silver tunnel of cedars fireflies drifted in fatuous pinpricks.
  The cedars were black and pointed on the sky like a paper silhouette; the
  sloping lawn had a faint sheen, a patina like silver. Somewhere a
  whippoorwill called, reiterant, tremulous, plaintful above the insects.
  Three cars passed. The fourth slowed and swung toward the gate. Horace
  stepped into the light. Behind the wheel Snopes loomed bulkily, giving the
  impression of having been inserted into the car before the top was put on.
  He extended his hand.
  "How're you tonight, Judge? Didn't know you was living in town again until
  I tried to call you out to Mrs. Sartorises."
  "Well, thanks," Horace said. He freed his hand. "What's this you've got
  hold of?"
            SANCTUARY           115
  Snopes creased himself across the wheel and peered out beneath the top,
  toward the house.
  "We'll talk here," Horace said. "Save you having to turn around."
  "It aint very private here," Snopes said. "But that's for you to say."
  Huge and thick he loomed, hunched, his featureless face moonlike itself
  in the refraction of the moon. Horace could feel Snopes watching him,
  with that sense of portent which had come over the wire; a quality
  calculating and cunning and pregnant. It seemed to him that he watched
  his mind flicking this way and that, striking always that vast, soft,
  inert bulk, as though it were caught in an avalanche of cottonseedhulls.
  "Let's go into the house," Horace said. Snopes opened the door. "Go on,"
  Horace said, "I'll walk up." Snopes drove on. He was getting out of the
  car when Horace overtook him. "Well, what is it?" Horace said.
  Again Snopes looked at the house. "Keeping batch, are you?" he said.
  Horace said nothing. "Like I always say, every married man ought to have
  a little place of his own, where he can git off to himself without it
  being nobody's business what he does. 'Course a man owes something to his
  wife, but what they dont know caint hurt them, does it? Long's he does
  that, I caint see where she's got ere kick coming. Aint that what you
  say?"
  "She's not here," Horace said, "if that's what you're hinting at. What
  did you want to see me about?"
  Again he felt Snopes watching him, the unabashed stare calculating and
  completely unbelieving. "Well, I always say, caint nobody tend to a man's
  private business but himself. I aint blaming you. But when you know me
  better, you'll know I aint loose-mouthed. I been around I been there. .
  . . Have a cigar?" His big hand flicked to his breast and offered two
  cigars.
 "No, thanks."
  Snopes lit a cigar, his face coming out of the match like a pie set on
  edge.
 "What did you want to see me about?" Horace said.
  Snopes puffed the cigar. "Couple days ago I come onto a piece of
  information which will be of value to you, if I aint mistook."
 "Oh. Of value. What value?"
  "I'll leave that to you. I got another party I could dicker with, but
  being as me and you was fellow-townsmen and all that."
  Here and there Horace's mind flicked and darted. Snopes' family
  originated somewhere near Frenchman's Bend and
 116        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 still lived there. He knew of the devious means by which infoi-ination
 passed from man to man of that illiterate race w..ich populated that section
 of the country. But surely it cant be something he'd try to sell to the
 State, he thought. Even he is not that big a fool.
 "You'd better tell me what it is, then," he said.
  He could feel Snopes watching him. "You remember one day you got on the
  train at Oxford, where you'd been on some bus-"
 "Yes," Horace said.
  Snopes puffed the cigar to an even coal, carefully, at some length. He
  raised his hand and drew it across the back of his neck. "You recall
  speaking to me about a girl."
 "Yes. Then what?"
 "That's for you to say."
  He could smell the honeysuckle as it bore up the silver slor)e, and he
  heard the whippoorwill, liquid, plaintful, reiterant. "You mean, you know
  where she is?" Snopes said nothing. "And that for a price you'll tell?"
  Snopes said not.ang. Horace shut his hands and put them in his pockets,
  shut against his flanks. "What makes you think that information will
  interest me?"
  "That's for you to judge. I aint conducting no murder case. I wasn't down
  there at Oxford looking for her. Of course, if it dont, IT dicker with the
  other party. I just give you the chance."
  Horace turned toward the steps. He moved gingerly, like an old man. "Let's
  sit down," he said. Snopes followed and sat on the step. They sat in the
  moonlight. "You know where she is?"
  "I seen her." Again he drew his hand across the back of his neck. "Yes,
  sir. If she aint-hasn't been there, you can git your money back. I caint
  say no fairer, can IT'
  "And what's your price?" Horace said. Snopes puffed the cigar to a careful
  coal. "Go on," Horace said. "I'm not going to haggle." Snopes told him.
  "All right," Horace said. "I'll pay it." He drew his knees up and set his
  elbows on them and laid his hands to his face. "Where is- Wait. Are you a
  Baptist, by any chance?"
  "My folks is. I'm putty liberal, myself. I aint hidebound in no sense, as
  you'll find when you know me better."
  "All right," Horace said from behind his hands. "Where is she?"
  "I'll trust you," Snopes said. "She's in a Memphis 'ho'house."
               XXIII

 AS HORACE ENTERED MISS REBA'S GATE AND APPROACHED THE
 lattice door, someone called his name from behind him. It was evening; the
 windows in the weathered, scaling wall were close pale squares. He paused
 and looked back. Around an adjacent corner Snopes' head peered, turkey-like.
 He stepped into view. He looked up at the house, then both ways along the
 street. He came along the fence and entered the gate with a wary air.
  "Well, Judge," he said. "Boys will be boys, won't they?" He didn't offer to
  shake hands. Instead he bulked above Horace with that air somehow assured
  and alert at the same time, glancing over his shoulder at the street. "Like
  I say, it never done no man no harm to git out now and then and-"
  "What is it now?" Horace said. "What do you want with me?"
  "Now, now, Judge. I aint going to tell this at home. Git that idea clean
  out of your mind. If us boys started telling what we know, caint none of us
  git off a train at Jeff erson again, hey?"
  "You know as well as I do what I'm doing here. What do you want with me?"
  "Sure; sure," Snopes said. "I know how a fellow feels, married and all and
  not being sho where his wife is -at." Between jerky glances over his
  shoulder he winked at Horace. "Make your mind easy. It's the same with me
  as if the grave knowed it. Only I hate to see a good-" Horace had gone on
  toward the door. "Judge," Snopes said in a penetrant undertone. Horace
  turned. "Dont stay."
 "Dont stay?"
  "See her and then leave. It's a sucker place. Place for farm boys. Higher'n
  Monte Carlo. I'll wait out hyer and I'll show you a place where-" Horace
  went on and entered the lattice. Two hours later, as he sat talking to Miss
  Reba in her room while beyond the door feet and now and then voices came
  and went in the hall on the stair, Minnie entered with a torn scrap of
  paper and brought it to Horace.
 "What's that?" Miss Reba said.
  "That big pie-faced-ted man left it fer him," Minnie said. "He say fer you
  to come on down there."
 "Did you let him in?" Miss Reba said.
 "Nome. He never tried to git in."
  "I guess not," Miss Reba said. She grunted. "Do you know him?" she said to
  Horace.
  "Yes. I cant seem to help myself," Horace said. He opened the paper. Torn
  from a handbill, it bore an address in pencil in a neat, flowing hand.
                117
 118        WILLIAM FAULKNER
  "He turned up here about two weeks ago," Miss Reba said. "Come in looking
  for two boys and sat around the diningroom blowing his head off and
  feeling the girls' behinds, but if he ever spent a cent I dont know it.
  Did he ever give you an order, Minnie?"
 "Nome," Minnie said.
  "And couple of nights later he was here again. Didn't spend nuttin,
  didn't do nuttin but talk, and I says to him 'Look here, mister, folks
  what uses this waiting-room has got to get on the train now and then.'
  So next time he brought a half-pint of whiskey with him. I dont mind
  that, from a good customer. But when a fellow like him comes here three
  times, pinching my girls and bringing one half-pint of whiskey and
  ordering four coca-colas . . . Just a cheap, vulgar man, honey. So I told
  Minnie not to let him in anymore, and here one afternoon I aint no more
  than laid down for a nap when-I never did find out what he done to Minnie
  to get in. I know he never give her nuttin. How did he do it, Minnie? He
  must a showed you something you never seen before. Didn't he?"
  Minnie tossed her head. "He aint got nothing I wantin to see. I done seed
  too many now fer my own good." Minnie's husband had quit her. He didn't
  approve of Minnie's business. He was a cook in a restaurant and he took
  all the clothes and jewelry the white ladies had given Minnie and went
  off with a waitress in the restaurant.
  "He kept on asking and hinting around about that girl," Miss Reba said,
  "and me telling him to go ask Popeye if he wanted to know right bad. Not
  telling him nuttin except to get out and stay out, see; so this day it's
  about two in the afternoon and I'm asleep and Minnie lets him in and he
  asks her who's here and she tells him aint nobody, and he goes on up
  stairs. And Minnie says about that time Popeye comes in. She says she
  dont know what to do. She's scared not to let him in and she says she
  knows if she does and he spatters that big bastard all over the upstairs
  floor, she knows I'll fire her and her husband just quit her and all.
  "So Popeye goes on upstairs on them cat feet of his and comes on your
  friend on his knees, peeping through the keyhole. Minnie says Popeye
  stood behind him for about a minute, with his hat cocked over one eye.
  She says he took out a cigarette and struck a match on his thumbnail
  without no noise and lit it and then she says he reached over and held
  the match to the back of your friend's neck, and Minnie says she stood
  there halfway up the stairs and watched them; that fellow kneeling there
  with his face like a pie took out of the oven too soon and Popeye
  squirting smoke through his nose and kind of jerking his head at him.
  Then she come on down
            SANCTUARY           119
 and in about ten seconds here he comes down the stairs with both hands on
 top of his head, going wump-wump-wump inside like one of these here big
 dray-horses, and he pawed at the door for about a minute, moaning to
 himself like the wind in a chimney Minnie says, until she opened the door
 and let him out. And that's the last time he's even rung this bell until
 tonight. . . . Let me see that." Horace gave her the paper. "That's a
 nigger whorehouse," she said. "The lousMinnie, tell him his friend aint
 here. Tell him I dont know where he went.
 Minnie went out. Miss Reba said,
  "I've had all sorts of men in my house, but I got to draw the line
  somewhere. I had lawyers, too. I had the biggest lawyer in Memphis back
  there in my dining-room, treating my girls. A millionaire. He weighed two
  hundred and eighty pounds and he had his own special bed made and sent
  down here. It's upstairs right this minute. But all in the way of my
  business, not theirs. I aint going to have none of my girls pestered by
  lawyers without good reason."
  "And you dont consider this good reason? That a man is being tried for
  his life for something he didn't do? You may be guilty right now of
  harboring a fugitive from justice."
  "Then let them come take him. I got nuttin to do with it. I had too many
  police in this house to be seared of them." She raised the tankard and
  drank and drew the back of her hand across her mouth. "I aint going to
  have nuttin to do with nuttin I dont know about. What Popeye done outside
  is his business. When he starts killing folks in my house, then I'll take
  a hand."
  "Have you any children?" She looked at him. "I don't mean to pry into
  your affairs," he said. "I was just thinking about that woman. She'll be
  on the streets again, and God only knows what will become of that baby."
  "Yes," Miss Reba said. "I'm supporting four, in a Arkansaw home now. Not
  mine, though." She lifted the tankard and looked into it, oscillating it
  gently. She set it down again. "It better not been born at all," she
  said. "None of them had." She rose and came toward him, moving heavily,
  and stood above him with her harsh breath. She put her hand on his head
  and tilted his face up. "You aint lying to me, are you?" she said, her
  eyes piercing and intent and sad. "No, you aint." She released him. "Wait
  here a minute. I'll see." She went out. He heard her speak to Minnie in
  the hall, then he heard her toil up the stairs.
  He sat quietly as she had left him. The room contained a wooden bed, a
  painted screen, three over-stuffed chairs, a wall safe. The
  dressing-table was littered with toilet articles
 120        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 tied in pink satin bows. The mantel supported a wax lily beneath a glass
 bell; above it, draped in black, the photograph of a meek-looking man with
 an enormous moustache. On the walls hung a few lithographs of spurious
 Greek scenes, and one picture done in tatting. Horace rose and went to the
 door. Minnie sat in a chair in the dim hall.
 "Minnie," he said, "I've got to have a drink. A big one."
  He had just finished it when Minnie entered again. "She say fer you to
  come on up," she said.
  He mounted the stairs. Miss Reba waited at the top. She led the way up
  the hall and opened a door into a dark room. "You'll have to talk to her
  in the dark," she said. "She wont have no light." Light from the hall
  fell through the door and across the bed. "This aint hers," Miss Reba
  said. "Wouldn't even see you in her room at all. I reckon you better
  humor her until you find out what you want." They entered. The light fell
  across the bed, upon a motionless curving ridge of bedclothing, the
  general tone of the bed unbroken. She'll smother, Horace thought.
  "Honey," Miss Reba said. The ridge did not move. "Here he is honey. Long
  as you're all covered up, let's have some light. Then we can close the
  door." She turned the light on.
 "She'll smother," Horace said.
  "She'll come out in a minute," Miss Reba said. "Go on. Tell her what you
  want. I better stay. But dont mind me. I couldn't a stayed in my business
  without learning to be deaf and dumb a long time before this. And if I'd
  ever a had any curiosity, I'd have worn it out long ago in this house.
  Here's a chair." She turned, but Horace anticipated her and drew up two
  chairs. He sat down beside the bed and, talking at the top of the
  unstirring ridge, he told her what he wanted.
  "I just wanted to know what really happened. You wont commit yourself.
  I know that you didn't do it. I'll promise before you tell me a thing
  that you wont have to testify in Court unless they are going to hang him
  without it. I know how you feel. I wouldn't bother you if the man's life
  were not at stake."
 The ridge did not move.
  "They're going to hang him for something he never done," Miss Reba said.
  "And she wont have nuttin, nobody. And you with diamonds, and her with
  that poor little kid. You seen it, didn't you?"
 The ridge did not move.
  "I know how you feel," Horace said. "You can use a different name, wear
  clothes nobody will recognise you in, glasses."
  "They aint going to catch Popeye, honey," Miss Reba said. "Smart as he
  is. You dont know his name, noway, and if you


            SANCTUARY            121
 have to go and tell them in court, I'll send him word after you leave and
 he'll go somewheres and send for you. You and him don't want to stay here in
 Memphis. The lawyer'll take care of you and you won't have to tell nuttin
 you-" The ridge moved. Temple flung the covers back and sat up. Her head was
 tousled, her face puffed, two spots of rouge on her cheekbones and her mouth
 painted into a savage cupid's bow. She stared for an instant at Horace with
 blank antagonism, then she looked away.
  "I want a drink," she said pulling up the shoulder of her gown.
 "Lie down," Miss Reba said. "You'll catch cold."
 "I want another drink," Temple said.
  "Lie down and cover up your nekkidness, anyway," Miss Reba said, rising.
  "You already had three since supper."
  Temple dragged the gown up again. She looked at Horace. "You give me a
  drink, then."
  "Come on, honey," Miss Reba said, trying to push her down. "Lie down and
  get covered up and tell him about that business. I'll get you a drink in a
  minute."
  "Let me alone," Temple said, writhing free. Miss Reba drew the covers about
  her shoulders. "Give me a cigarette, then. Have you got one?" she asked
  Horace.
  "I'll get you one in a minute," Miss Reba said. "Will you do what he wants
  you to?"
  "What?" Temple said. She looked at Horace with her black, belligerent
  stare.
 "You needn't tell me where your-he-" Horace said.
  "Dont think I'm afraid to tell," Temple said. "I'll tell it anywhere. Dont
  think I'm afraid. I want a drink."
 "You tell him, and I'll get you one," Miss Reba said.
  Sitting up in the bed, the covers about her shoulders, Temple told him of
  the night she had spent in the ruined house, from the time she entered the
  room and tried to wedge the door with the chair, until the woman came to
  the bed and led her out. That was the only part of the whole experience
  which appeared to have left any impression on her at all: the night which
  she had spent in comparative inviolation. Now and then Horace would attempt
  to get her on ahead to the crime itself, but she would elude him and return
  to herself sitting on the bed, listening to the men on the porch, or lying
  in the dark while they entered the room and came to the bed and stood there
  above her.
  "Yes; that," she would say. "It just happened. I dont know. I had been
  scared so long that I guess I had just gotten used to being. So I just sat
  there in those cottonseeds and watched him. I thought it was the rat at
  first. There were two of them
 122        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 there. One was in the corner looking at me and the other was in the
 corner. I dont know what they lived on, because there wasn't anything
 there but corncobs and cottonseeds. Maybe they went to the house to eat.
 But there wasn't any in the house. I never did hear one in the house. I
 thought it might have been a rat when I first heard them, but you can feel
 people in a dark room: did you know that? You dont have to see them. You
 can feel them like you can in a car when they begin to look for a good
 place to stop-you know: park for a while." She went on like that, in one
 of those bright, chatty monologues which women can carry on when they
 realise that they have the center of the stage; suddenly Horace realised
 that she was recounting the experience with actual pride, a sort of naive
 and impersonal vanity, as though she were making it up, looking from him
 to Miss Reba with quick, darting glances like a dog driving two cattle
 along a lane.
  "And so whenever I breathed I'd hear those shucks. I dont see how anybody
  ever sleeps on a bed like that. But maybe you get used to it. Or maybe
  they're tired at night. Because when I breathed I could hear them, even
  when I was just sitting on the bed. I didn't see how it could be just
  breathing, so I'd sit as still as I could, but I could still hear them.
  That's because breathing goes down. You think it goes up, but it doesn't.
  It goes down you, and I'd hear them getting drunk on the porch. I got to
  thinking I could see where their heads were leaning back against the wall
  and I'd say Now this one's drinking out of the jug. Now that one's
  drinking. Like the mashed-in place on the pillow after you got up, you
  know.
  "That was when I got to thinking a funny thing. You know how you do when
  you're scared. I was looking at my legs and I'd try to make like I was
  a boy. I was thinking about if I just was a boy and then I tried to make
  myself into one by thinking. You know how you do things like that. Like
  when you know one problem in class and when they came to that you look
  at him and think right hard, Call on me. Call on me. Call on me. I'd
  think about what they tell children, about kissing your elbow, and I
  tried to. I actually did. I was that scared, and I'd wonder if I could
  tell when it happened. I mean, before I looked, and I'd think I had and
  how I'd go out and show them-you know. I'd strike a match and say Look.
  See? Let me alone, now. And then I could go back to bed. I'd think how
  I could go to bed and go to sleep then, because I was sleepy. I simply
  couldn't hardly hold my eyes open.
  "So I'd hold niy eyes tight shut and say Now I am. I am now. I'd look at
  my legs and I'd think about how much I had done for them. I'd think about
  how many dances I had taken them to-crazy, like that. Because I thought
  how much I'd
            SANCTUARY           123
 done for them, and now they'd gotten me into this. So I'd think about
 praying to be changed into a boy and I would pray and then I'd sit right
 still and wait. Then I'd think maybe I couldn't tell it and I'd get ready
 to look. Then I'd think maybe it was too soon to look; that if I looked
 too soon I'd spoil it and then it wouldn't, sure enough. So I'd count. I
 said to count fifty at first, then I thought it was still too soon, and
 I'd say to count fifty more. Then I'd think if I didn't look at the right
 time, it would be too late.
  "Then I thought about fastening myself up some way. There was a girl went
  abroad one summer that told me about a kind of iron belt in a museum a
  king or something used to lock the queen up in when he had to go away,
  and I thought if I just had that. That was why I got the raincoat and put
  it on. The canteen was hanging by it and I got it too and put it in the-"
 "Canteen?" Horace said. "Why did you do that?"
  "I dont know why I took it. I was just scared to leave it there, I guess.
  But I was thinking if I just had that French thing. I was thinking maybe
  it would have long sharp spikes on it and he wouldn't know it until too
  late and I'd jab it into him. I'd jab it all the way through him and
  think about the blood running on me and how I'd say I guess that'll teach
  you! I guess you'll let me alone now! I'd say. I didn't know it was going
  to be just the other way . . . I want a drink."
  "I'll get you one in a minute," Miss Reba said. "Go on and tell him."
  "Oh, yes; this was something else funny I did." She told about lying in
  the darkness with Gowan snoring beside her, listening to the shucks and
  hearing the darkness full of movement, feeling Popeye approaching. She
  could hear the blood in her veins, and the little muscles at the corners
  of her eyes cracking faintly wider and wider, and she could feel her nos-
  trils going alternately cool and warm. Then he was standing over and she
  was saying Come on. Touch me. Touch me! You're a coward if you don't.
  Coward! Coward!
  "I wanted to go to sleep, you see. And he just kept on standing there.
  I thought if he'd just go on and get it over with, I could go to sleep.
  So I'd say You're a coward if you dont! You're a coward if you dont! and
  I could feel my mouth getting fixed to scream, and that little hot ball
  inside you that screams. Then it touched me, that nasty little cold band,
  fiddling around inside the coat where I was naked. It was like alive ice
  and my skin started jumping away from it like those little flying fish
  in front of a boat. It was like my skin knew which way it was going to
  go before it started moving, and my
 124        WILLIAM FAULKNER

 skin would keep on jerking just ahead of it like there wouldn't be
 anything there when the hand got there.
  "Then it got down where my insides begin, and I hadn't eaten since
  yesterday at dinner and my insides started bubbling and going on and the
  shucks begin to make so much noise it was like laughing. I'd think they
  were laughing at me because all the time his hand was going inside the
  top of my knickers and I hadn't changed into a boy yet.
  "That was the funny thing, because I wasn't breathing then. I hadn't
  breathed in a long time. So I thought I was dead. Then I did a funny
  thing. I could see myself in the coffin. I looked sweet-you know: all in
  white. I had on a veil like a bride, and I was crying because I was dead
  or looked sweet or something. No: it was because they had put shucks in
  the coffin. I was crying because they had put shucks in the coffin where
  I was dead, but all the time I could feel my nose going cold and hot and
  cold and hot, and I could see all the people sitting around the coffin,
  saying Dont she look sweet. Dont she look sweet.
  "But I kept on saying Coward! Coward! Touch me, coward! I got mad,
  because he was so long doing it. I'd talk to him. I'd say Do you think
  I'm going to lie here all night, just waiting on you? I'd say. Let me
  tell you what I'll do, I'd say. And I'd lie there with the shucks
  laughing at me and me jerking away in front of his hand and I'd think
  what I'd say to him, I'd talk to him like the teacher does in school, and
  then I was a teacher in school and it was a little black thing like a
  nigger boy, kind of, and I was the teacher. Because I'd say How old am
  I? and I'd say I'm forty-five years old. I had iron-gray hair and
  spectacles and I was all big up here like women get. I had on a gray
  tailored suit, and I never could wear gray. And I was telling it what I'd
  do, and it kind of drawing up like it could already see the switch.
  "Then I said That wont do. I ought to be a man. So I was an old man, with
  a long white beard, and then the little black man got littler and littler
  and I was saying Now. You see now. I'm a man now. Then I thought about
  being a man, and as soon as I thought it, it happened. It made a kind of
  plopping sound, like blowing a little rubber tube wrong-side outward. It
  felt cold, like the inside of your mouth when you hold it open. I could
  feel it, and I lay right still to keep from laughing about how surprised
  he was going to be. I could feel the jerking going on inside my knickers
  ahead of his hand and me lying there trying not to laugh about how
  surprised and mad he was going to be in about a minute. Then all of a
  sudden I went to sleep. I couldn't even stay awake until his hand got
  there. I just went to sleep. I couldn't even feel myself jerking
            SANCTUARY            125
 in front of his hand, but I could hear the shucks. I didn't wake up until
 that woman came and took me down to the crib."
  As he was leaving the house Miss Reba said: "I wish you'd get her down
  there and not let her come back. I'd find her folks myself, if I knowed how
  to go about it. But you know how . . . She'll be dead, or in the asylum in
  a year, way him and her go on up there in that room. There's something
  funny about it that I aint found out about yet. Maybe it's her. She wasn't
  born for this kind of life. You have to be born a butcher or a barber, I
  guess. Wouldn't anybody be either of them just for money or fun."
  Better for her if she were dead tonight, Horace thought, walking on. For
  me, too. He thought of her, Popeye, the woman, the child, Goodwin, all put
  into a single chamber, bare, lethal, immediate and profound: a single
  blotting instant between the indignation and the surprise. And I too;
  thinking how that were the only solution. Removed, cauterised out of the
  old and tragic flank of the world. And 1, too, now that we're all isolated;
  thinking of a gentle dark wind blowing in the Iona corridors of sleep; of
  lying beneath a low cozy root under the long sound of the rain: the evil,
  the injustice, the tears. In an alley-mouth two figures stood, face to
  face, not touching; the man speaking in a low tone unprintable epithet
  after epithet in a caressing whisper, the woman motionless before him as
  though in a musing swoon of voluptuous ecstasy. Perhaps it is upon t,ic
  instant that we realise, admit, that there is a logical pattern to evil,
  that we die, he thought, thinking of the expression ~'ie had once seen in
  the eyes of a dead child, and of other dead: the cooling indignation, the
  shocked despair fading, leaving two empty globes in which the motionless
  world lurked profoundly in miniature.
  He did not even return to his hotel. He went to the station. He could get
  a train at midnight. He had a cup of coffee and wished inimediately that he
  had not, for it lay in a hot ball on his stomach. Three hours later, when
  he got off at Jefferson, it was still there, unassiniflated. He walked to
  town and crossed the deserted square. He thought of the other morning when
  he had crossed it. It was as thougli there had not been any elapsed time
  between: the same gesture of the lighted clock-face, the same vulture-like
  shadows in the doorways; it might be the same morning and he had merely
  crossed the square, about-faced and was returning; all between a dream
  filled with all the ni-htm are shapes it had taken him forty-three years to
  invent, concentrated in a hot, hard lump in his stomach. Suddenly he was
  walking fast, the coffee jolting like a hot, heavy rock inside him.
 126        WILLIAM FAULKNER
  He walked quietly up the drive, beginning to smell the honeysuckle from
  the fence. The house was dark, still, as though it were marooned in space
  by the ebb of all time. The insects had fallen to a low monotonous pitch,
  everywhere, nowhere, spent, as though the sound were the chemical agony
  of a world left stark and dying above the tide-edge of the fluid in which
  it lived and breathed. The moon stood overhead, but without light; the
  earth lay beneath, without darkness. He opened the door and felt his way
  into the room and to the light. The voice of the night-insects, whatever
  it was -had followed him into the house; he knew suddenly that it was the
  friction of the earth on its axis, approaching that moment when it must
  decide to turn on or to remain forever still: a motionless ball in
  cooling space, across which a thick smell of honeysuckle writhed like
  cold smoke.
  He found the light and turned it on. The photograph sat on the dresser.
  He took it up, holding it in his hands. Enclosed by the narrow imprint
  of the missing frame Little Belle's face dreamed with that quality of
  sweet chiaroscuro. Communicated to the cardboard by some quality of the
  light or perhaps by some infinitesimal movement of his hands, his own
  breathing, the face appeared to breathe in his palms in a shallow bath
  of highlight, beneath the slow, smokelike tongues of invisible
  honeysuckle. Almost palpable enough to be seen, the scent filled the room
  and the small face seemed to swoon in a voluptuous languor, blurring
  still more, fading, leaving upon his eye a soft and fading aftermath of
  invitation and voluptuous promise and secret affirmation like a scent it-
  self.
  Then he knew what that sensation in his stomach meant. He put the
  photograph down hurriedly and went to the bathroom. He opened the door
  running and fumbled at the light. But he had not time to find it and he
  gave over and plunged forward and struck the lavatory and leaned upon his
  braced arms while the shucks set up a terrific uproar beneath her thighs.
  Lying with her head lifted slightly, her chin depressed like a figure
  lifted down from a crucifix, she watched something black and furious go
  roaring out of her pale body. She was bound naked on her back on a flat
  car moving at speed through a black tunnel, the blackness streaming in
  rigid threads overhead, a roar of iron wheels in her ears. The car shot
  bodily from the tunnel in a long upward slant, the darkness overhead now
  shredded with parallel attenuations of living fire, toward a crescendo
  like a held breath, an interval in which would swing faintly and lazily
  in nothingness filled with pale, myriad points of light. Far beneath she
  could hear the faint, furious uproar of the shucks.
               XXIV

 THE FIRST TIME TEMPLE WENT TO THE HEAD OF THE STAIRS Minnie's eyeballs
 rolled out of the dusky light beside Miss Reba's door. Leaning once more
 within her bolted door Temple heard Miss Reba toil up the stairs and knock.
 Temple leaned silently against the door while Miss Reba panted and wheezed
 beyond it with a mixture of blandishment and threat. She made no sound.
 After a while Miss Reba went back down the stairs.
  Temple turned from the door and stood in the center of the room, beating
  her hands silently together her eyes black in her livid face. She wore a
  street dress, a nat. She removed the hat and hurled it into a corner and
  went and flung herself face down upon the bed. The bed had not been made.
  The table beside it was littered with cigarette stubs, the adjacent floor
  strewn with ashes. The pillow slip on that side was spotted with brown
  holes. Often in the night she would wake to smell tobacco and to see the
  single ruby eye where Popeye's mouth would be.
  It was midmorning. A thin bar of sunlight fell beneath the drawn shade of
  the south window, lying upon the sill and then upon the floor in a narrow
  band. The house was utterly quiet, with that quality as of spent breathing
  which it had in the midmorning. Now and then a car passed in the street be-
  neath.
  Temple turned over on the bed. When she did so she saw one of Popeye's
  innumerable black suits lying across a chair. She lay looking at it for a
  while, then she rose and snatched the garments up and hurled them into the
  corner where the hat was. In another corner was a closet improvised by a
  print curtain. It contained dresses of all sorts and all new. She ripped
  them down in furious wads and flung them after the suit, and a row of hats
  from a shelf. Another of Popeye's suits hung there also. She flung it down.
  Behind it, hanging from a nail, was an automatic pistol in a holster of
  oiled silk. She took it down gingerly and removed the pistol and stood with
  it in her hand. After a moment she went to the bed and hid it beneath the
  pillow.
  The dressing-table was cluttered with toilet-things-brushes and mirrors,
  also new; with flasks and jars of delicate and bizarre shapes, bearing
  French labels. One by one she gath. ered them up and hurled them into the
  corner in thuds and splintering crashes. Among them lay a platinum bag: a
  delicate webbing of metal upon the smug orange gleam of banknotes. This
  followed the other things into the corner and she returned to the bed and
  lay again on her face in a slow thickening of expensive scent.
                127
 128        WILLIAM FAULKNER

  At noon Minnie tapped at the door. "Here yo dinner." Temple didn't move.
  "I ghy leave it here by the door. You can git it when you wants it." Her
  feet went away. Temple did not move.
  Slowly the bar of sunlight shifted across the floor; the western side of
  the window-frame was now in shadow. Temple sat up, her head turned aside
  as though she were listening, fingering with deft habitude at her hair.
  She rose quietly and went to the door and listened again. Then she opened
  it. The' tray sat on the floor. She stepped over it and went to the
  stairs and peered over the rail. After a while she made Minnie out,
  sitting in a chair in the hall.
  "Minnie," she said. Minnie's head jerked up; again her eyes rolled
  whitely. "Bring me a drink," Temple said. She returned to her room. She
  waited fifteen minutes. She banged the door and was tramping furiously
  down the stairs when Minnie appeared in the hall.
  "Yessum," Minnie said, "Miss Reba say- We ain't got no -" Miss Reba's
  door opened. Without looking up at Temple she spoke to Minnie, Minnie
  lifted her voice again. "Yessum; all right. I bring it up in just a
  minute."
  "You'd better," Temple said. She returned and stood just inside the door
  until she heard Minnie mount the stairs. Temple opened the door, holdng
  it just ajar.
  "Aint you going to eat no dinner?" Minnie said, thrusting at the door
  with her knee. Temple held it to.
 "Where is it?" she said.
  "I aint straightened your room up this mawnin," Minnie said.
  "Give it here," Temple said, reaching her hand through the crack. She
  took the glass from the tray.
  "You better make that un last," Minnie said. "Miss Reba say you aint ghy
  git no more. . . . What you want to treat him this-a-way, fer? Way he
  spend his money on you, you ought to be ashamed. He a right pretty little
  man, even if he aint no John Gilbert, and way he spendin his money-" Tem-
  ple shut the door and shot the bolt. She drank the gin and drew a chair
  up to the bed and lit a cigarette and sat down with her feet on the bed.
  After a while she moved the chair to the window and lifted the shade a
  little so she could see the street beneath. She lit another cigarette.
  At five o'clock she saw Miss Reba emerge, in the black silk and flowered
  hat, and go down the street. She sprang up and dug the hat from the mass
  of clothes in the corner and put it on. At the door she turned and went
  back to the comer and exhumed the platinum purse and descended the
  stairs. Minnie was in the hall.
            SANCTUARY           129
  "I'll give you ten dollars," Temple said. "I wont be gone ten minutes."
  "I caint do it, Miss Temple. Hit be worth my job if Miss Reba find it out,
  and my th'oat too, if Mist Popeye do."
  "I swear I'll be back in ten minutes. I swear I will. Twenty dollars." She
  put the bill in Minnie's hand.
  "You better come back," Minnie said, opening the door. "If you aint back
  here in ten minutes, I aint going to be, neither."
  Temple opened the lattice and peered out. The street was empty save for a
  taxi at the curb across the way, and a man in a cap standing in a door
  beyond it. She went down the street, walking swiftly. At the corner a cab
  overtook her, slowing, the driver looking at her interrogatively. She
  turned into the drug store at the corner and went back to the telephone
  booth. Then she returned to the house. As she turned the corner she met the
  man in the cap who had been leaning in the door. She entered the lattice.
  Minnie opened the door.
  "Thank goodness," Minnie said. "When that cab over there started up, I got
  ready to pack up too. If you aint ghy say nothing about it, I git you a
  drink."
  When Minnie fetched the gin Temple started to drink it. Her hand was
  trembling as she stood again just inside the door, listening, the glass in
  her hand. I'll need it later, she said. I'll need more than that. She
  covered the glass with a saucer and hid it carefully. Then she dug into the
  mass of garments in the corner and found a dancing-frock and shook it out
  and hung it back in the closet. She looked at the other things a moment,
  but she returned to the bed and lay down again. At once she rose and drew
  the chair up and sat down, her feet on the unmade bed. While daylight died
  slowly in the room she sat smoking cigarette after cigarette, listening to
  every sound on the stairs.
  At half-past six Minnie brought her supper up. On the tray was another
  glass of gin. "Miss Reba sent this un," she said. "She say, how you
  feelin?"
  6'Tell her, all right," Temple said. "I'm going to have a bath and then go
  to bed, tell her."
  When Minnie was gone Temple poured the two drinks into a tumbler and
  gloated over it, the glass shaking in her hands. She set it carefully away
  and covered it and ate her supper from the bed. When she finished she lit
  a cigarette. Her movements were jerky; she smoked swiftly, moving about the
  room. She stood for a moment at the window, the shade lifted aside, then
  she dropped it and turned into the room again, spying herself in the
  mirror. She turned before it, studying herself puffing at the cigarette.
 130        WILLIAM FAULKNER

  She snapped it behind her, toward the fireplace, and went to the mirror and
  combed her hair. She ripped the curtain aside and took the dress down and
  laid it on the bed and returned and drew out a drawer in the dresser and
  took a garment out. She paused with the garment in her hand, then she
  replaced it and closed the drawer and caught up the frock swiftly and hung
  it back in the closet. A moment later she found herself walking up and down
  the room, another cigarette burning in her hand, without any recollection
  of having lit it. She flung it away and went to the table and looked at her
  watch and propped it against the pack of cigarettes so she could see it
  from the bed, and lay down. When she did so she felt the pistol through her
  pillow. She slipped it out and looked at it, then she slid it under her
  flank and lay motionless, her legs straight, her hands behind her head, her
  eyes focussing into black pinheads at every sound of the stairs.
  At nine she rose. She picked up the pistol again; after a moment she thrust
  it beneath the mattress and undressed and in a spurious Chinese robe
  splotched with gold dragons and jade and scarlet flowers she left the room.
  When she returned her hair curled damply about her face. She went to the
  washstand and took up the tumbler, holding it in her hands, but she set it
  down again.
  She dressed, retrieving the bottles and jars from the corner. Her motions
  before the glass were furious yet painstaking. She went to the washstand
  and took up the glass, but again she paused and went to the corner, got her
  coat and put it on and put the platinum bag in the pocket and leaned once
  more to the mirror. Then she went, took up the glass, gulped the gin and
  left the room, walking swiftly.
  A single light burned in the hall. It was empty. She could hear voices in
  Miss Reba's room but the lower hall was deserted. She descended swiftly and
  silently and gained the door. She believed that it would be at the door
  that they would stop her and she thought of the pistol with acute regret,
  almost pausing, knowing that she would use it without any compunction
  whatever, with a kind of pleasure. She sprang to the door and pawed at the
  bolt, her head turned over her shoulder.
  it opened. She sprang out and out the lattice door and ran down the walk
  and out the gate. As she did so a car, moving slowly along the curb,
  stopped opposite her. Popeye sat at the wheel. Without any apparent
  movement from him the door swung open. He made no movement, spoke no word.
  He just sat there, the straw hat slanted a little aside.
 "I wont!" Temple said. "I wont!"
 He made no movement, no sound. She came to the car.
            SANCTUARY            131
  "I wont, I tell you!" Then she cried wildly: "You're scared of him! You're
  scared to!"
  "I'm giving him his chance," he said. "Will you go back in that house, or
  will you get in this car?"
 "You're scared tol"
  "I'm giving him his chance," he said, in his cold soft voice. "Come on.
  Make up your mind."
  She leaned forward, putting her hand on his arm. "Popeye," she said;
  "daddy." His arm felt frail, no larger than a child's, dead and hard and
  light as a stick,
 "I dont care which you do," he said. "But do it. Come on."
  She leaned toward him, her hand on his arm. Then she got into the car. "You
  wont do it. You're afraid to. He's a better man than you are."
  He reached across and shut the door. "Where?" he said. "Grotto?"
  "He's a better man than you are!" Temple said shrilly. "You're not even a
  man! He knows it. Who does know it if he dont?" The car was in motion. She
  began to shriek at him. "You, a man, a bold bad man, when you cant evenWhen
  you had to bring a real man in to- And you hanging over the bed, moaning
  and slobbering like a- You couldn't fool me once, could you? No wonder I
  bled and bluh-" his hand came over her mouth, hard, his nails going into
  her flesh. With the other hand he drove the car at reckless speed. When
  they passed beneath lights she could see him watching her as she struggled,
  tugging at his hand, whipping her head this way and that.
  She ceased struggling, but she continued to twist her head from side to
  side, tugging at his hand. One finger, ringed with a thick ring, held her
  lips apart, his finger-tips digging into he.cheek. With the other hand he
  whipped the car in and out of traffic, bearing down upon other cars until
  they slewed aside with brakes squealing, shooting recklessly across
  intersections. Once a policeman shouted at them, but he did not even look
  around.
  Temple began to whimper, moaning behind his hand, drooting upon his
  fingers. The ring was like a dentist's instrument; she could not close her
  lips to regurgitate. When he removed it she could feel the imprint of his
  fingers cold on her jaw. She lifted her hand to it.
  "You hurt my mouth," she whimpered. They were approaching the outskirts of
  the city, the speedometer at fifty miles. His hat slanted above his
  delicate hooked profile. She nursed her jaw. The houses gave way to broad,
  dark subdivisions out of which realtors' signs loomed abrupt and ghostly,
  with a quality of forlorn assurance. Between them
 132        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 low, far lights hung in the cool empty darkness blowing with fireflies. She
 began to cry quietly, feeling the cooling double drink of gin inside her.
 "You hurt my mouth," she said in a voice small and faint with self-pity. She
 nursed her jaw with experimental fingers, pressing harder and harder until
 she found a twinge. "You'll be sorry for this," she said in a muffled voice.
 "When I tell Red. Dont you wish you were Red? Dont you wish you could do
 what he can do? Dont you wish he was the one watching us instead of you?"
  They turned into the Grotto, passing along a closely curtained wall from
  which a sultry burst of music came. She sprang out while he was locking the
  car and ran on up the steps. "I gave you your chance," she said. "You
  brought me here. I didn't ask you to come."
  She went to the washroom. In the mirror she examined her face. "Shucks,"
  she said, "it didn't leave a mark, even"; drawing the flesh this way and
  that. "Little runt," she said, peering at her reflection. She added a
  phrase, glibly obscene, with a detached parrotlike effect. She painted her
  mouth again. Another woman entered. They examined one another's clothes
  with brief, covert, cold embracing glances.
  Popeye was standing at the door to the dancehall, a cigarette in his
  fingers.
  "I gave you your chance," Temple said. "You didn't have to come."
 "I dont take chances," he said.
 "You took one," Temple said. "Are you sorry? Hub?"
  "Go on," he said, his hand on her back. She was in the act of stepping over
  the sill when she turned and looked at him, their eyes almost on a level;
  then her hand flicked toward his armpit. He caught her wrist; the other
  hand flicked toward him. He caught that one too in his soft, cold hand.
  They looked eye to eye, her mouth open and the rouge spots darkening slowly
  on her face.
  "I gave you your chance back there in town," he said. "You took it."
  Behind her the music beat, sultry, evocative; filled with movement of feet,
  the voluptuous hysteria of muscles warming the scent of flesh, of the
  blood. "Oh, God; oh, God," she said, her lips scarce moving. "I'll go. I'll
  go back."
 "You took it," he said. "Go on."
  In his grasp her hands made tentative plucking motions at his coat just out
  of reach of her finger-tips. Slowly he was turning her toward the door, her
  head reverted. "You just dare!" she cried. "You just-" His hand closed upon
  the back of her neck, his fingers like steel, yet cold and light as
  alumi-
  
              SANCTUARY            133
 num. She could hear the vertebrae grating faintly together, and his voice,
 cold and still.
 "Will you?"
  She nodded her head. Then they were dancing. She could still feel his hand
  at her neck. Across his shoulder she looked swiftly about the room, her
  gaze flicking from face to face among the dancers. Beyond a low arch, in
  another room, a group stood about the crap-table. She leaned this way and
  that, trying to see the faces of the group.
  Then they saw the four men. They were sitting at a table near the door. One
  of them was chewing gum; the whole lower part of his face seemed to be
  cropped with teeth of an unbelievable whiteness and size. When she saw them
  she swung Popeye around with his back to them, working the two of them
  toward the door again. Once more her harried gaze flew from face to face in
  the crowd.
  When she looked again two of the men had risen. They approached. She
  dragged Popeye into their path, still keeping his back turned to them. The
  men paused and essayed to go around her; again she backed Popeye into their
  path. She was trying to say something to him, but her mouth felt cold. It
  was like trying to pick up a pin with the fingers numb. Suddenly she felt
  herself lifted bodily aside, Popeye's small arms light and rigid as
  aluminum. She stumbled back against the wall and watched the two men leave.
  "I'll go back," she said. "I'll go back." She began to laugh shrilly.
 "Shut it," Popeye said. "Are you going to shut it?"
  "Get me a drink," she said. She felt his hand; her legs felt cold too, as
  if they were not hers. They were sitting at a table. Two tables away the
  man was still chewing, his elbows on the table. The fourth man sat on his
  spine, smoking, his coat buttoned across his chest.
  She watched hands: a brown one in a white sleeve, a soiled white one
  beneath a dirty cuff, setting bottles on the table. She had a glass in her
  hand. She drank, gulping; with the glass in her hand she saw Red standing
  in the door, in a gray suit and a spotted bow tie. He looked like a college
  boy, and he looked about the room until he saw her. He looked at the back
  of Popeye's head, then at her as she sat with the glass in her hand. The
  two men at the other table had not moved. She could see the faint, steady
  movement of the one's ears as he chewed. The music started.
  She held Popeye's back toward Red. He was still watching her, almost a head
  taller than anybody else. "Come on," she said in Popeye's ear. "If you're
  going to dance, dance."
  She had another drink. They danced again. Red had disappeared. When the
  music ceased she had another drink. It
 134        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 did no good. It merely lay hot and hard inside her. "Come
 on,"                             she said, "dont quit." But he wouldn't
 get up, and she
 stood over him, her muscles flinching and jerking with ex
 haustion and terror. She began to jeer at him. "Call your
 self a                           man, a bold, bad man, and let a girl
 dance you off your
 feet." Then her face drained, became small and haggard
 and sincere; she spoke like a child, with sober despair. "Pop
 eye." He sat with his hands on the table, finicking with a
 cigarette, the second glass with its melting ice before him.
 She put her hand on his shoulder. "Daddy," she said. Moving
 to shield them from the room, her hand stole toward his arm
 pit, touching the butt of the flat pistol. It lay right in the light,
 dead                             vise of his arm and side. "Give it to
 me," she whispered.
 "Daddy. Daddy." She leaned her thigh against his shoulder,
 caressing his arm with her flank. "Give it to me, daddy," she
 whispered. Suddenly her hand began to steal down his body
 in a swift, covert movement; then it snapped away in a move
 ment                             of revulsion. "I forgot," she whispered;
 "I didn't mean
   I didn't . . . 11
  One of the men at the other table hissed once through his teeth. "Sit
  down," Popeye said. She sat down. She filled her glass, watching her hands
  perform the action. Then she was watching the corner of the gray coat. He's
  got a broken button, she thought stupidly. Popeye had not moved.
 "Dance this?" Red said.
  His head was bent but he was not looking at her. He was turned a little,
  facing the two men at the other table. Still Popeye did not move. He
  shredded delicately the end of the cigarette, pinching the tobacco off.
  Then he put it into his mouth.
 "I'm not dancing," Temple said through her cold lips.
  "Not?" Red said. He said, in a level tone, without moving: "How's the boy?"
  "Fine," Popeye said. Temple watched him scrape a match, saw the flame
  distorted through glass. "You've had enough," Popeye said. His hand took
  the glass from her lips. She watched him empty it into the ice bowl. The
  music started again. She sat looking quietly about the room. A voice began
  to buzz faintly at her hearing, then Popeye was gripping her wrist, shaking
  it, and she found that her mouth was open and that she must have been
  making a noise of some sort with it. "Shut it, now," he said. "You can have
  one more." He poured the drink into the glass.
  "I haven't felt it at all," she said. He gave her the glass. She drank.
  When she set the glass down she realised that she was drunk. She believed
  that she had been drunk for some time. She thought that perhaps she had
  passed out and that it
            SANCTUARY            135
 had already happened. She could hear herself saying I hope it has. I hope
 it has. Then she believed it had and she was overcome by a sense of
 bereavement and of physical desire. She thought, I will never be again,
 and she sat in a floating swoon of agonised sorrow and erotic longing,
 thinking of Red's body, watching her hand holding the empty bottle over
 the glass.
  "You've drunk it all," Popeye said. "Get up, now. Dance it off." They
  danced again. She moved stiffly and languidly, her eyes open but
  unseeing; her body following the music without hearing the tune for a
  time. Then she became aware that the orchestra was playing the same tune
  as when Red was asking her to dance. If that were so, then it couldn't
  have happened yet. She felt a wild surge of relief. It was not too late:
  Red was still alive; she felt long shuddering waves of physical desire
  going over her, draining the color from her mouth, drawing her eyeballs
  back into her skull in a shuddering swoon.
  They were at the crap-table. She could hear herself shouting to the dice.
  She was rolling them, winning; the counters were piling up in front of
  her as Popeye drew them in, coaching her, correcting her in his soft,
  querulous voice. He stood beside her, shorter than she.
  He had the cup himself. She stood beside him cunningly, feeling the
  desire going over her in wave after wave, involved with the music and
  with the smell of her own flesh. She became quiet. By infinitesimal
  inches she moved aside until someone slipped into her place. Then she was
  walking swiftly and carefully across the floor toward the door, the
  dancers, the music swirling slowly about her in a bright myriad wave. The
  table where the two men had sat was empty, but she did not even glance
  at it. She entered the corridor. A waiter met her.
 "Room," she said. "Hurry."
  The room contained a table and four chairs. The waiter turned on the
  light and stood in the door. She jerked her hand at him; he went out. She
  leaned against the table on her braced arms, watching the door, until Red
  entered.
  He came toward her. She did not move. Her eyes began to grow darker and
  darker, lifting into her skull above a half moon of white, without focus,
  with the blank rigidity of a statue's eyes. She began to say
  Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah in an expiring voice, her body arching slowly backward as
  though faced by an exquisite torture. When he touched her she sprang like
  a bow, hurling herself upon him, her mouth gaped and ugly like that of
  a dying fish as she writhed her loins against him.
  He dragged his face free by main strength. With her hips grinding against
  him, her mouth gaping in straining protrusion, bloodless, she began to
  speak. "Let's hurry. Any-
   136        WILLIAM FAULKNER

 where. I've quit him. I told him so. It's not my fault. Is it my fault? You
 dont need your hat and I dont either. He came here to kill you but I said I
 gave him his chance. It wasn't my fault. And now it'll just be us. Without
 him there watching. Come on. What're you waiting for?" She strained her
 mouth toward him, dragging his head down, making a whimpering moan. He held
 his face free. "I told him I was. I said if you bring me here. I gave you
 your chance I said. And now he's got them there to bump you off. But you're
 not afraid. Are you?"
 "Did you know that when you telephoned me?" he said.
  "What? He said I wasn't to see you again. He said he'd kill you. But he had
  me followed when I telephoned. I saw him. But you're not afraid. He's not
  even a man, but you are. You're a man. You're a man." She began to grind
  against him, dragging at his head, murmuring to him in parrotlike
  underworld epithet, the saliva running pale over her bloodless lips. "Are
  you afraid?"
  "Of that dopey bastard?" Lifting her bodily he turned so that he faced the
  door, and slipped his right hand free. She did not seem to be aware that he
  had moved.
  "Please. Please. Please. Please. Don't make me wait. I'm burning up."
  "All right. You go on back. You wait till I give you the sign. Will you go
  on back?"
  "I can't wait. You've got to. I'm on fire, I tell you." She clung to him.
  Together they blundered across the room toward the door, he holding her
  clear of his right side; she in a voluptuous swoon, unaware that they were
  moving, straining at him as though she were trying to touch him with all of
  her body-surface at once. He freed himself and thrust her into the passage.
 "Go on," he said. "I'll be there in a minute."
 "You won't be long? I'm on fire. I'm dying, I tell you."
 "No. Not long. Go on, now."
  The music was playing. She moved up the corridor, staggering a little. She
  thought that she was leaning against the wall, when she found that she was
  dancing again; then that she was dancing with two men at once; then she
  found that she was not dancing but that she was moving toward the door
  between the man with the chewing gum and the one with the buttoned coat.
  She tried to stop, but they bad her under the arms; she opened her mouth to
  scream, taking one last despairing look about the swirling room.
  "Yell," the man with the buttoned coat said. "Just try it once."
 Red was at the crap-table. She saw his head turned, the
            SANCTUARY           137
 cup in his lifted hand. With it he made her a short, cheery salute. He
 watched her disappear through the door, between the two men. Then he
 looked briefly about the room. His face was bold and calm, but there were
 two white lines at the base of his nostrils and his forehead was damp. He
 rattled the cup and threw the dice steadily.
 "Eleven," the dealer said.
 "Let it lay," Red said. "I'll pass a million times tonight."
  They helped Temple into the car. The man in the buttoned coat took the
  wheel. Where the drive joined the lane that led to the highroad a long
  touring car was parked. When they passed it Temple saw, leaning to a
  cupped match, Popeye's delicate hooked profile beneath the slanted hat
  as he lit the cigarette. The match flipped outward like a dying star in
  miniature, sucked with the profile into darkness by the rush of their
  passing.
               XXV

 "THE TABLES HAD BEEN MOVED TO ONE END OF THE DANCE floor. On each one was
 a black table-cloth. The curtains were still drawn; a thick,
 salmon-colored light fell through them. Just beneath the orchestra
 platform the coffin sat. It was an expensive one: black, with silver
 fittings, the trestles hidden by a mass of flowers. In wreaths and crosses
 and other shapes of ceremonial mortality, the mass appeared to break in
 a symbolical wave over the bier and on upon the platform and the piano,
 the scent of them quickly oppressive.
  The proprietor of the place moved about among the tables, speaking to the
  arrivals as they entered and found seats. The negro waiters, in black
  shirts beneath their starched jackets, were already moving in and out
  with glasses and bottles of ginger ale. They moved with swaggering and
  decorous repression; already the scene was vivid, with a hushed, macabre
  air a little febrile.
  The archway to the dice-room was draped in black. A black pall lay upon
  the crap-table, upon which the overflow of floral shapes was beginning
  to accumulate. People entered steadily, the men in dark suits of decorous
  restraint, others in light, bright shades of spring, increasing the
  atmosphere of macabre paradox. The women, the younger ones, wore bright
  colors also, in hats and scarves; the older ones in sober gray and black
  and navy blue, and glittering with diamonds: matronly figures ,resembling
  housewives on a Sunday afternoon excursion.
  The room began to hum with shrill, hushed talk. The waiters moved here
  and there with high, precarious trays, their white jackets and black
  shirts resembling photograph negatives. The proprietor went from table
  to table with his bald
 138        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 head, a huge diamond in his black cravat, followed by the bouncer, a
 thick, musclebound, bullet-headed man who appeared to be on the point of
 bursting out of his dinner-jacket through the rear, like a cocoon.
  In a private dining-room, on a table draped in black, sat a huge bowl of
  punch floating with ice and sliced fruit. Beside it leaned a fat man in
  a shapeless greenish suit, from the sleeves of which dirty cuffs fell
  upon hands rimmed with black nails. The soiled collar was wilted about
  his neck in limp folds, knotted by a greasy black tie with an imitation
  ruby stud. His face gleamed with moisture and he adjured the throng about
  the bowl in a harsh voice.
  "Come on, folks. It's on Gene. It dont cost you nothing. Step up and
  drink. There wasn't never a better boy walked than him." They drank and
  fell back, replaced by others with extended cups. From time to time a
  waiter entered with ice and fruit and dumped them into the bowl; from a
  suit case under the table Gene drew fresh bottles and decanted them into
  the bowl; then, proprietorial, adjurant, sweating, he resumed his harsh
  monologue, mopping his face on his sleeve. "Come on, folks. It's all on
  Gene. I aint nothing but a bootlegger, but he never had a better friend
  than me. Step up and drink, folks. There's more where that come from."
  From the dance hall came a strain of music. The people entered and found
  seats. On the platform was the orchestra from a downtown hotel, in dinner
  coats. The proprietor and a second man were conferring with the leader.
  "Let them play jazz," the second man said. "Never nobody liked dancing
  no better than Red."
  "No, no," the proprietor said. "Time Gene gets them all ginned up on free
  whisky, they'll start dancing. It'll look bad."
 "How about the Blue Danube?" the leader said.
  "No, no; dont play no blues, I tell you," the proprietor said. "There's
  a dead man in that bier."
 "That's not blues," the leader said.
 "What is it?" the second man said.
 "A waltz. Strauss."
  "A wop?" the second man said. "Like hell. Red was an American. You may
  not be, but he was. Dont you know anything American? Play I can't Give
  You Anything but Love. He always liked that."
  "And get them all to dancing?" the proprietor said. He glanced back at
  the tables, where the women were beginning to talk a little shrilly. "You
  better start off with Nearer, My God, To Thee," he said, "and sober them
  up some. I told Gene it was risky about that punch, starting it so soon.
  My suggestion was to wait until we started back to town. But I
            SANCTUARY           139
 might have knowed somebody'd have to turn it into a carnival. Better start
 off solemn and keep it up until I give you the sign.,,
  "Red wouldn't like it solemn," the second man said. "And you know it."
  "Let him go somewheres else, then," the proprietor said. "I just done this
  as an accommodation. I aint running no funeral parlor."
  The orchestra played Nearer, My God, To Thee. The audience grew quiet. A
  woman in a red dress came in the door unsteadily. "Whoopee," she said, "so
  long, Red. He'll be in hell before I could even reach Little Rock."
  "Shhhhhhhh!" voices said. She fell into a seat. Gene came to the door and
  stood there until the music stopped.
  "Come on, folks," he shouted, jerking his arms in a fat, sweeping gesture,
  "come and get it. It's on Gene. I dont want a dry throat or eye in this
  place in ten minutes." Those at the rear moved toward the door. The
  proprietor sprang to his feet and jerked his hand at the orchestra. The
  cornetist rose and played In That Haven of Rest in solo, but the crowd at
  the back of the room continued to dwindle through the Aoor where Gene stood
  waving his arms. Two middle-aged women were weeping quietly beneath
  flowered hats.
  They surged and clamored about the diminishing bowl. From the dance hall
  came the rich blare of the cornet. Two soiled young men worked their way
  toward the table, shouting "Gangway. Gangway" monotonously, carrying suit
  cases. They opened them and set bottles on the table, while Gene, frankly
  weeping now, opened them and decanted them into the bowl. "Come up, folks.
  I couldn't a loved him no better ii he'd been my own son," he shouted
  hoarsely, dragging his sleeve across his face.
  A waiter edged up to the table with a bowl of ice and fruit and went to put
  them into the punch bowl. "What the hell you doing?" Gene said, "putting
  that slop in there? Get to hell away from here."
  "Ra-a-a-a-y-y-y-yl" they shouted, clasping their cups, drowning all save
  the pantomime as Gene knocked the bowl of fruit from the waiter's hand and
  fell again to dumping liquor into the bowl, sploshing it into and upon the
  extended hands and cups. The two youths opened bottles furiously.
  As though swept there upon a brassy blare of music the proprietor appeared
  in the door, his face harried, waving his arms. "Come on, folks," he
  shouted, "let's finish the musical program. It's costing us money."
 "Hell with it," they shouted.
 "Costing who money?"
 140        WILLIAM FAULKNER

 "Who cares?"
 "Costing who money?"
  "Who begrudges it? I'll pay it. By God, I'll buy him two funerals."
  "Folks! Folks!" the proprietor shouted. "Dont you realise there's a bier in
  that room?"
 "Costing who money?"
  "Beer?" Gene said. "Beer?" he said in a broken voice. "Is anybody here
  trying to insult me by-"
 "He begrudges Red the money."
 "Who does?"
 "Joe does, the cheap son of a bitch."
 "Is somebody here trying to insult me---2'
  "Let's move the funeral, then. This is not the only place in town."
 "Let's move Joe."
 "Put the son of a bitch in a coffin. Let's have two funerals."
 "Beer? Beer? Is somebody-"
 "Put the son of a bitch in a coffin. See how he likes it."
  "Put the son of a bitch in a coffin," the woman in red shrieked. They
  rushed toward the door, where the proprietor stood waving his hand above
  his head, his voice shrieking out of the uproar before he turned and fled.
  In the main room a male quartet engaged from a vaudeville house was
  singing. They were singing mother songs in close harmony; they sang Sonny
  Boy. The weeping was general among the older women. Waiters were now
  carrying cups of punch in to them and they sat holding the cups in their
  fat, ringed hands, crying.
  The orchestra played again. The woman in red staggered into the room. "Come
  on, Joe," she shouted, "open the game. Get that damn stiff out of here and
  open the game." A man tried to hold her; she turned upon him with a burst
  of filthy language and went on to the shrouded crap table and hurled a
  wreath to the floor. The proprietor rushed toward her, followed by the
  bouncer. The proprietor grasped the woman as she lifted another floral
  piece. The man who had tried to hold her intervened, the woman cursing
  shrilly and striking at both of them impartially with the wreath. The
  bouncer caught the man's arm; he whirled and struck at the bouncer, who
  knocked him halfway across the room. Three more men entered. The fourth
  rose from the floor and all four of them rushed at the bouncer.
  He felled the first and whirled and sprang with an unbelievable celerity,
  into the main room. The orchestra was playing. It was immediately drowned
  in a sudden pandemonium of chairs and screams. The bouncer whirled again
  and met the
            SANCTUARY            141
 rush of the four men. They mingled; a second man flew out and skittered
 along the floor on his back; the bouncer sprang free. Then he whirled and
 rushed them; in a whirling plunge they bore down upon the bier and crashed
 into it. The orchestra had ceased and were now climbing onto their chairs
 with their instruments. The floral offerings flew; the coffin teetered.
 "Catch it!" a voice shouted. They sprang forward but the coffin crashed
 heavily to the floor, coming open. The corpse tumbled slowly and sedately
 out and came to rest with its face in the center of a wreath.
  "Play something!" the proprietor bawled, waving his arms; .,play! Play!"
  When they raised the corpse the wreath came too, attached to him by a
  hidden end of a wire driven into his cheek. He had worn a cap which,
  tumbling off, exposed a small blue hole in the center of his forehead. It
  had been neatly plugged with wax and was painted, but the wax had been
  jarred out and lost. They couldn't find it, but by unfastening the snap in
  the peak, they could draw the cap down to his eyes.

  As the cort~ge neared the downtown section more cars joined in. The hearse
  was followed by six Packard touring cars with the tops back, driven by
  liveried chauffeurs and filled with flowers. They looked exactly alike and
  were of the type rented by the hour by the better class agencies. Next came
  a nondescript line of taxis, roadsters, sedans, which increased as the
  procession moved slowly through the restricted district where faces peered
  from beneath lowered shades, toward the main artery that led back out of
  town, toward the cemetery.
  On the avenue the hearse increased its speed, the procession stretching out
  at swift intervals. Presently the private cars and the cabs began to drop
  out. At each intersection they would turn this way or that, until at last
  only the hearse and the six Packards were left, each carrying no occupant
  save the liveried driver. The street was broad and now infrequent, with a
  white line down the center that diminished on ahead and into the smooth
  asphalt emptiness. Soon the hearse was making forty miles an hour, then
  forty-five and then fifty.
  One of the cabs drew up at Miss Reba's door. She got out, followed a thin
  woman in sober, severe clothes and gold nose-glasses, and a short plump
  woman in a plumed hat, her face hidden by a handkerchief, and a small
  bullet-headed boy of five or six. The woman with the handkerchief continued
  to sob in snuffy gasps as they went up the walk and entered the lattice.
  Beyond the house door the dogs set up a falsetto uproar. When Minnie opened
  the door they surged
 142        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 about Miss Reba's feet. She kicked them aside. Again they assailed her
 with snapping eagerness; again she flung them back against the wall in
 muted thuds.
  "Come in, come in," she said, her hand to her breast. Once inside the
  house the woman with the handkerchief began to weep aloud.
 "Didn't he look sweet?" she wailed. "Didn't he look sweet!"
 "Now, now," Miss Reba said, leading the way to her room,
 come in and have some beer. You'll feel better. Minnie!" They entered the
 room with the decorated dresser, the safe, the screen, the draped
 portrait. "Sit down, sit down," she panted, shoving the chairs forward.
 She lowered herself into one and stooped terrifically toward her feet.
  "Uncle Bud, honey," the weeping woman said, dabbing at her eyes, "come
  and unlace Miss Reba's shoes."
  The boy felt and removed Miss Reba's shoes. "And if you'll just reach me
  them house slippers under the bed there, honey," Miss Reba said. The boy
  fetched the slippers. Minnie entered, followed by the dogs. They rushed
  at Miss Reba and began to worry the shoes she had just removed.
  "Scatl" the boy said, striking at one of them with his hand. The dog's
  head snapped around, it's teeth clicking, it's halfhidden eyes bright and
  malevolent. The boy recoiled. "You bite me, you thon bitch," he said.
  "Uncle Bud!" the fat woman said, her round face, rigid in fatty folds and
  streaked with tears, turned upon the boy in shocked surprise, the plumes
  nodding precariously above it. Uncle Bud's head was quite round, his Dose
  bridged with freckles like splotches of huge summer rain on a sidewalk.
  The other woman sat primly erect, in gold nose-glasses on a gold chain
  and neat iron-gray hair. She looked like a schoolteacher. "The very
  ideal" the fat woman said. "How in the world can he learn such words on
  an Arkansaw farm, I don't know."
  "They'll learn meanness anywhere," Miss Reba said. Minnie leaned down a
  tray bearing three frosted tankards. Uncle Bud watched with round
  cornflower eyes as they took one each. The fat woman began to cry again.
 "He looked so sweet!" she wailed.
  "We all got to suffer it," Miss Reba said. "Well, may it be a long day-,"
  lifting her tankard. They drank, bowing formally to one another. The fat
  woman dried her eyes; the two guests wiped their lips with prim decorum.
  The thin one coughed delicately aside, behind her hand.
 "Such good beer," she said.
  "Aint it?" the fat one said. "I always say it's the greatest pleasure I
  have to call on Miss Reba."
            SANCTUARY           143
  They began to talk politely, in decorous half-completed sentences, with
  little gasps of agreement. The boy had moved aimlessly to the window,
  peering beneath the lifted shade.
  "How long's he going to be with you, Miss Myrtle?" Miss Reba said.
  "Just till Sat'dy," the fat woman said. "Then he'll go back home. It
  makes a right nice little change for him, with me for a week or two. And
  I enjoy having him."
 "Children are such a comfort to a body," the thin one said.
  "Yes," Miss Myrtle said. "Is them two nice young fellows still with you,
  Miss Reba?"
  "Yes," Miss Reba said. "I think I got to get shut of them, though. I aint
  specially tenderhearted, but after all it aint no use in helping young
  folks to learn this world's meanness until they have to. I already had
  to stop the girls running around the house without no clothes on, and
  they dont like it."
  They drank again, decorously, handling the tankards delicately, save Miss
  Reba who grasped hers as though it were a weapon, her other hand lost in
  her breast. She set her tankard down empty. "I get so dry, seems like,"
  she said. "Wont you ladies have another?" They murmured, ceremoniously.
  "Minnie!" Miss Reba shouted.
  Minnie came and filled the tankards again. "Reely, I'm right ashamed,"
  Miss Myrtle said. "But Miss Reba has such good beer. And then we've all
  had a kind of upsetting afternoon."
  "I'm just surprised it wasn't upset no more," Miss Reba said. "Giving
  away all that free liquor like Gene done."
  "It must have cost a good piece of jack," the thin woman said.
  "I believe you," Miss Reba said. "And who got anything out of it? Tell
  me that. Except the privilege of having his place hell-full of folks not
  spending a cent." She had set her tankard on the table beside the chair.
  Suddenly she turned her head sharply and looked at it. Uncle Bud was now
  behind her chair, leaning against the table. "You aint been into my beer,
  have you, boy?" she said.
  "You, Uncle Bud," Miss Myrtle said. "Aint you ashamed? I declare, it's
  getting so I dont dare take him nowhere. I never see such a boy for
  snitching beer in my life. You come out here and play, now. Come on."
  "Yessum," Uncle Bud said. He moved, in no particular direction. Miss Reba
  drank and set the tankard back on the table and rose.
  "Since we all been kind of tore up," she said, "maybe I can prevail on
  you ladies to have a little sup of gin?"
 "No; reely," Miss Myrtle said.
 144        WILLIAM FAULKNER
  "Miss Reba's the perfect hostess," the thin one said. "How many times you
  heard me say that, Miss Myrtle?"
 "I wouldn't undertake to say, dearie," Miss Myrtle said.
 Miss Reba vanished behind the screen.
  "Did you ever see it so warm for June, Miss Lorraine?" Miss Myrtle said.
  "I never did," the thin woman said. Miss Myrtle's face began to crinkle
  again. Setting her tankard down she began to fumble for her handkerchief.
  "It just comes over me like this," she said, "and them singing that Sonny
  Boy and all. He looked so sweet," she waded.
  "Now, now," Miss Lorraine said. "Drink a little beer. You'll feel better.
  Miss Myrtle's took again," she said, raising her voice.
  "I got too tender a heart," Miss Myrtle said. She snuffled behind the
  handkerchief, groping for her tankard. She groped for a moment, then it
  touched her hand. She looked quickly up. "You, Uncle Bud!" she said.
  "Didn't I tell you to come out from behind there and play? Would you
  believe it? The other afternoon when we left here I was so mortified I
  didn't know what to do. I was ashamed to be seen on the street with a drunk
  boy like you."
  Miss Reba emerged from behind the screen with three glasses of gin.
  "This'll put some heart into us," she said. "We're setting here like three
  old sick cats." They bowed formally and drank, patting their lips. Then
  they began to talk. They were all talking at once, again in half-completed
  sentences, but without pauses for agreement or affirmation.
  "It's us girls," Miss Myrtle said. "Men just cant seem to take us and leave
  us for what we are. They make us what we are, then they expect us to be
  different. Expect us not to never look at another man, while they come and
  go as they please."
  "A woman that wants to fool with more than one man at a time is a fool,"
  Miss Reba said. "They're all trouble, and why do you want to double your
  trouble? And the woman that cant stay true to a good man when she gets him,
  a freehearted spender that never give her a hour's uneasiness or a hard
  word . . ." looking at them, her eyes began to fill with a sad, unutterable
  expression, of baffled and patient despair.
  "Now, now," Miss Myrtle said. She leaned for-ward and patted Miss Reba's
  huge hand. Miss Lorraine made a faint clucking sound with her tongue.
  "You'll get yourself started."
  "He was such a good man," Miss Reba said. "We was like two doves. For
  eleven years we was like two doves."
 "Now, dearie; now, dearie," Miss Myrtle said.
            SANCTUARY          .145
  "It's when it comes over me like this," Miss Reba said. "Seeing that boy
  laying there under them flowers."
  "He never had no more than Mr. Binford had," Miss Myrtle said. "Now, now.
  Drink a little beer."
  Miss Reba brushed her sleeve across her eyes. She drank some beer.
  "He ought to known better than to take a chance with Popeye's girl," Miss
  Lorraine said.
  "Men dont never learn better than that, dearie," Miss Myrtle said. "Where
  you reckon they went, Miss Reba?"
  "I dont know and I dont care," Miss Reba said. "And how soon they catch
  him and burn him for killing that boy, I dont care neither. I dont care
  none."
  "He goes all the way to Pensacola every summer to see his mother," Miss
  Myrtle said. "A man that'll do that cant be all bad."
  "I dont know how bad you like them, then," Miss Reba said. "Me trying to
  run a respectable house, that's been running a shooting-gallery for
  twenty years, and him trying to turn it into a peep-show."
  "It's us poor girls," Miss Myrtle said, "causes all the trouble and gets
  all the suffering."
  "I heard two years ago he wasn't no good that way," Miss Lorraine said.
  "I knew it all the time," Miss Reba said. "A young man spending his money
  like water on girls and not never going to bed with one. It's against
  nature. All the girls thought it was because he had a little woman out
  in town somewhere, but I says mark my words, there's something funny
  about him. There's a funny business somewhere."
 "He was a free spender, all right," Miss Lorraine said.
  "The clothes and jewelry that girl bought, it was a shame," Miss Reba
  said. "There was a Chinee robe she paid a hundred dollars for-imported,
  it was-and perfume at ten dollars an ounce; next morning when I went up
  there, they was all wadded in the corner and the perfume and rouge busted
  all over them like a cyclone. That's what she'd do when she got mad at
  him, when he'd beat her. After he shut her up and wouldn't let her leave
  the house. Having the front of my house watched like it was a . . ." She
  raised the tankard from the table to her lips. Then she halted it,
  blinking. "Where's my-"
  "Uncle Bud!" Miss Myrtle said. She grasped the boy by the arm and
  snatched him out from behind Miss Reba's chair and shook him, his round
  head bobbing on his shoulders with an expression of equable idiocy. "Aint
  you ashamed? Aint you ashamed? Why cant you stay out of these ladies'
  beer? I'm a good mind to take that dollar back and make you buy Miss
 146        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 Reba a can of beer, I am for a fact. Now, you go over by the window and
 stay there, you hear?"
  "Nonsense," Miss Reba said. "There wasn't much left. You ladies are about
  ready too, aint you? Minnie!"
  Miss Lorraine touched her mouth with her handkerchief. Behind her glasses
  her eyes rolled aside in a veiled, secret look. She laid the other hand
  to her flat spinster's breast.
  "We forgot about your heart, honey," Miss Myrtle said. "Dont you reckon
  you better take gin this time?"
 "Reely, I-" Miss Lorraine said.
  "Yes; do," Miss Reba said. She rose heavily and fetched three more
  glasses of gin from behind the screen. Minnie entered and refilled the
  tankards. They drank, patting their lips.
  "First I knowed was when Minnie told me there was something funny going
  on," Miss Reba said. "How he wasn't here hardly at all, gone about every
  other night, and that when he was here, there wasn't no signs at all the
  next morning when she cleaned up. She'd hear them quarrelling, and she
  said it was her wanting to get out and he wouldn't let her. With all them
  clothes he was buying her, mind, he didn't want her to leave the house,
  and she'd get mad and lock the door and wouldn't even let him in."
  "Maybe he went off and got fixed up with one of these glands, these
  monkey glands, and it quit on him," Miss Myrtle said.
  "Then one morning he come in with Red and took him up there. They stayed
  about an hour and left, and Popeye didn't show up again until next
  morning. Then him and Red come back and stayed up there about an hour.
  When they left, Minnie come and told me what was going on, so next day
  I waited for them. I called him in here and I says 'Look here, you son
  of a buh---2 " She ceased. For an instant the three of them sat
  motionless, a little forward. Then slowly their heads turned and they
  looked at the boy leaning against the table.
  "Uncle Bud, honey," Miss Myrtle said, "dont you want to go and play in
  the yard with Reba and Mr. Binford?"
  "Yessum," the boy said. He went toward the door. They watched him until
  the door closed upon him. Miss Lorraine drew her chair up; they leaned
  together.
 "And that's what they was doing?" Miss Myrtle said.
  "I say 'I been running a house for twenty years, but this is the first
  time I ever had anything like this going on in it. If you want to turn
  a stud in to your girl' I says 'go somewhere else to do it. I aint going
  to have my house turned into no French joint."
 "The son of a bitch," Miss Lorraine said.
            SANCTUARY            147
  "He'd ought tove had sense enough to get a old ugly man," Miss Myrtle
  said. "Tempting us poor girls like that."
  "Men always expects us to resist temptation," Miss Lorraine said. She was
  sitting upright like a school-teacher. "The lousy son of a bitch."
  "Except what they offers themselves," Miss Reba said. "Then watch them.
  . . . Every morning for four days that was going on, then they didn't
  come back. For a week Popeye didn't show up at all, and that girl wild
  as a young mare. I thought he was out of town on business maybe until
  Minnie told me he wasn't and that he give her five dollars a day not to
  let that girl out of the house nor use the telephone. And me trying to
  get word to him to come and take her out of my house because I didn't
  want nuttin like that going on in it. Yes, Sir, Minnie said the two of
  them would be nekkid as two snakes, and Popeye hanging over the foot of
  the bed without even his hat off, making a kind of whinnying sound."
  "Maybe he was cheering for them," Miss Lorraine said. "The lousy son of
  a bitch."
  Feet came up the hall; they could hear Minnie's voice lifted in
  adjuration. The door opened. She entered, holding Uncle Bud erect by one
  hand. Limp-kneed he dangled, his face fixed in an expression of glassy
  idiocy. "Miss Reba," Minnie said, "this boy done broke in the icebox and
  drunk a whole bottle of beer. You, boy!" she said, shaking him, "stan'
  upl" Limply he dangled, his face rigid in a slobbering grin. Then upon
  it came an expression of concern, consternation; Minnie swung him sharply
  away from her as he began to vomit.

               XXVI

 WHEN THE SUN ROSE, HORACE HAD NOT BEEN TO RED NOR even undressed. He was
 just finishing a letter to his wife, addressed to her at her f atber's in
 Kentucky, asking for a divorce. He sat at the table, looking down at the
 single page written neatly and illegibly over, feeling quiet and empty for
 the first time since he had found Popeye watching him across the spring
 four weeks ago. While he was sitting there he began to smell coffee from
 somewhere. "I'll finish this business and then I'll go to Europe. I am
 sick. I am too old for this. I was born too old for it, and I am sick to
 death for quiet."
  He shaved and made coffee and drank a cup and ate some bread. When he
  passed the hotel, the bus which met the morning train was at the curb,
  with the drummers getting into it. Clarence Snopes was one of them,
  carrying a tan suit case.
  "Going down to Jackson for a couple of days on a little business," he
  said. "Too bad I missed you last night. I come on
 148        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 back in a car. I reckon you was settled for the night, maybe?" He looked
 down at Horace, vast, pasty, his intentions unmistakable. "I could have
 took you to a place most folks dont know about. Where a man can do just
 whatever he is big enough to do. But there'll be another time, since I
 done got to know you better." He lowered his voice a little, moving a lit-
 tle aside. "Dont you be uneasy. I aint a talker. When I'm here, in
 Jefferson, I'm one fellow; what I am up in town with a bunch of good
 sports aint nobody's business but mine and their'n. Aint that right?"
  Later in the morning, from a distance he saw his sister on the street
  ahead of him turn and disappear into a door. He tried to find her by
  looking into all the stores within the radius of where she must have
  turned, and asking the clerks. She was in none of them. The only place
  he did not investigate was a stairway that mounted between two stores,
  to a corridor of offices on the first floor, one of which was that of the
  District Attorney Eustace Graham.
  Graham had a club foot, which had elected him to the office he now held.
  He worked his way into and through the State University; as a youth the
  town remembered him as driving wagons and trucks for grocery stores,
  During his first year at the University he made a name for himself by his
  industry, He waited on table in the commons and he had the government
  contract for carrying the mail to and from the local postoffice at the
  arrival of each train, hobbling along with the sack over his shoulder:
  a pleasant open-faced young man with a word for everyone and a certain
  alert rapacity about his eyes. During his second year he let his mail
  contract lapse and he resigned from his job in the commons; he also had
  a new suit. People were glad that he had saved through his industry to
  where he could give all his time to his studies. He was in the law school
  then, and the law professors groomed him like a race-horse. He graduated
  well, though without distinction. "Because he was handicapped at the
  start," the professors said. "If he had had the same start that the
  others had . . . He will go far," they said.
  It was not until he had left school that they learned that he had been
  playing poker for three years in the office of a livery stable, behind
  drawn shades. When, two years out of school, he got elected to the State
  legislature, they began to tell an anecdote of his school days.
  It was in the poker game in the livery stable office. The bet came to
  Graham. He looked across the table at the owner of the stable, who was
  his only remaining opponent.
 "How much have you got there, Mr. Harris?" he said.
 "Forty-two dollars, Eustace," the proprietor said. Eustace
            SANCTUARY            149
 shoved some chips into the pot. "How much is that?" the proprietor said.
 "Forty-two dollars, Mr. Harris."
  "Hmmm," the proprietor said. He examined his hand. "How many cards did
  you draw, Eustace?"
 "Three, Mr. Harris."
 "Hmmm. Who dealt the cards, Eustace?"
 "I did, Mr. Harris."
 "I pass, Eustace."
  He had been District Attorney but a short time, yet already he had let
  it be known that he would announce for Congress on his record of
  convictions, so when he found himself facing Narcissa across the desk in
  his dingy office, his expression was like that when he had put the
  forty-two dollars into the pot.
  "I only wish it weren't your brother," he said. "I hate to see a
  brother-in-arms, you might say, with a bad case." She was watching him
  with a blank, enveloping look. "After all, we've got to protect society,
  even when it does seem that society does not need protection."
 "Are you sure he cant win?" she said.
  "Well, the first principle of law is, God alone knows what the jury will
  do. Of course, you cant expect-"
 "But you don't think he will."
 "Naturally, I-"
  "You have good reason to think he cant. I suppose you know things about
  it that he doesn't."
  He looked at her briefly. Then he picked up a pen from his desk and began
  to scrape at the point with a paper cutter. "This is purely confidential.
  I am violating my oath of office. I wont have to tell you that. But it
  may save you worry to know that he hasn't a chance in the world. I know
  what the disappointment will be to him, but that cant be helped. We
  happen to know that the man is guilty. So if there's any way you know of
  to get your brother out of the case, I'd advise you to do it. A losing
  lawyer is like a losing anything else, ballplayer or merchant or doctor:
  his business is to-"
  "So the quicker he loses, the better it would be, wouldn't it?" she said.
  "If they hung the man and got it over with." His hands became perfectly
  still. He did not look up. She said, her tone cold and level: "I have
  reasons for wanting Horace out of this case. The sooner the better. Three
  nights ago the Snopes, the one in the legislature, telephoned out home,
  trying to find him. The next day he went to Memphis. I dont know what
  for. You'll have to find that out yourself. I just want Horace out of
  this business as soon as possible."
 150        WILLIAM FAULKNER

  She rose and moved toward the door. He hobbled over to open it; again she
  put that cold, still, unfathomable gaze upon him as though he were a dog or
  a cow and she waited for it to get out of her path. Then she was gone. He
  closed the door and struck a clumsy clogstep, snapping his fingers just as
  the door opened again; he snapped his hands toward his tie and looked at
  her in the door, holding it open.
 "What day do you think it will be over with?" she said.
  "Why, I cuh- Court opens the twentieth," he said. "It will be the first
  case. Say . . . Two days. Or three at the most, with your kind assistance.
  And I need not assure you that this will be held in strictest confidence
  between us . . ." He moved toward her, but her blank calculating gaze was
  like a wall, surrounding him.
  "That will be the twenty-fourth." Then she was looking at him again. "Thank
  you," she said, and closed the door.
  That night she wrote Belle that Horace would be home on the twenty-fourth.
  She telephoned Horace and asked for Belle's address.
 "Why?" Horace said.
  "I'm going to write her a letter," she said, her voice tranquil, without
  threat. Dammit, Horace thought, holding the dead wire in his hand, How can
  I be expected to combat people who will not even employ subterfuge. But
  soon he forgot it, forgot that she had called. He did not see her again
  before the trial opened.
  Two days before it opened Snopes emerged from a dentist's office and stood
  at the curb, spitting. He took a goldwrapned cigar from his pocket and
  removed the foil and put the cigar gingerly between his teeth. He had a
  black eye, and the bridge of his nose was bound in soiled adhesive tape.
  "Got hit by a car in Jackson," he told them in the barbershop. "But I dont
  think I never made the bastard pay," he said, showing a sheaf of yellow
  bills. He put them into a notecase and stowed it away. "I'm an American,"
  he said. "I dont brag about it, because I was born one. And I been a decent
  Baptist all my life, too. Oh, I aint no preacher and I aint no old maid; I
  been around with the boys now and then, but I reckon I aint no worse than
  lots of folks that pretends to sing loud in church. But the lowest,
  cheapest thing on this earth aint a nigger: it's a jew. We need laws
  against them. Drastic laws. When a durn lowlife jew can come to a free
  country like this and just because he's got a law degree, it's time to put
  a stop to things. A jew is the lowest thing on this creation. And the
  lowest kind of jew is a jew lawyer. And the lowest kind of jew lawyer is a
  Memphis jew lawyer. When a jew lawyer can hold up an
            SANCTUARY            151
 American, a white man, and not give him but ten dollars for something that
 two Americans, Americans, southron gentlemen; a judge living in the capital
 of the State of Mississippi and a lawyer that's going to be as big a man as
 his pa some day, and a judge too; when they give him ten times as much for
 the same thing than the lowlife jew, we need a law. I been a liberal spender
 all my life; whatever I had has always been my friends' too. But when a
 durn, stinking, lowlife jew will refuse to pay an American one tenth of what
 another American, and a judge at that-"
 "Wby did you sell it to him, then?" the barber said.
 "What?" Snopes said. The barber was looking at him.
  "What was you trying to sell to that car when it run over you?" the barber
  said.
 "Have a cigar," Snopes said.

              xxvii

 THE TRIAL WAS SET FOR THE TWENTIETH OF JUNE. A WEEK after his Memphis visit,
 Horace telephoned Miss Reba. "Just to know if she's still there," he said.
 "So I can reach her if I need to."
  "She's here," Miss Reba said. "But this reaching. I dont like it. I dont
  want no cops around here unless they are on my business."
  "It'll be only a bailiff," Horace said. "Someone to hand a paper into her
  own hand."
  "Let the postman do it, then," Miss Reba said. "He comes here anyway. In a
  uniform too. He dont look no worse in it than a full-blowed cop, neither.
  Let him do it."
  "I wont bother you," Horace said. "I wont make you any trouble."
  "I know you aint," Miss Reba said. Her voice was thin, harsh, over the
  wire. "I aint going to let you. Minnie's done took a crying spell tonight,
  over that bastard that left her, and me and Miss Myrtle was sitting here,
  and we got started crying too. Me and Minnie and Miss Myrtle. We drunk up
  a whole new bottle of gin. I cant afford that. So dont you be sending no
  jay cops up here with no letters for nobody. You telephone me and I'll turn
  them both out on the street and you can have them arrested there."
  On the night of the nineteenth he telephoned her again. He had some trouble
  in getting in touch with her.
  " They're gone," she said. "Both of them. Dont you read no papers?"
 "What papers?" Horace said. "Hello. Hello!"
 "They aint here no more, I said," Miss Reba said. "I dont
 152        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 know nuttin about them and I dont want to know nuttin except who's going to
 pay me a week's room rent on-"
 "But cant you find where she went to? I may need her."
  "I dont know nuttin and I dont want to know nuttin," Miss Reba said. He
  heard the receiver click. Yet the disconnection was not made at once. He
  heard the receiver thud onto the table where the telephone sat, and he
  could hear Miss Reba shouting for Minnie: "Minnie. Minnie!" Then some hand
  lifted the receiver and set it onto the hook; the wire clicked in his ear.
  After a while a detached Delsarteish voice said: "Pine Bluff dizzent . . .
  Enkyewl"

  The trial opened the next day. On the table lay the sparse objects which
  the District Attorney was offering: the bullet from Tommy's skull, a
  stoneware jug containing corn whisky.
  "I will call Mrs. Goodwin to the stand," Horace said. He did not look back.
  He could feel Goodwin's eyes on his back as he helped the woman into the
  chair. She was sworn, the child lying on her lap. She repeated the story as
  she had told it to him on the day after the child was ill. Twice Goodwin
  tried to interrupt and was silenced by the Court. Horace would not look at
  him.
  The woman finished her story. She sat erect in the chair, in her neat, worn
  gray dress and hat with the darned veil, the purple ornament on her
  shoulder. The child lay on her lap, its eyes closed in that drugged
  immobility. For a while her hand hovered about its face, performing those
  needless maternal actions as though unawares.
  Horace went and sat down. Then only did he look at Goodwin. But the other
  sat quietly now, his arms folded and his head bent a little, but Horace
  could see that his nostrils were waxy white with rage against his dark
  face. He leaned toward him and whispered, but Goodwin did not move.
 The District Attorney now faced the woman.
  "Mrs. Goodwin," he said, "what was the date of your marriage to Mr.
  Goodwin?"
 "I object!" Horace said, on his feet.
  "Can the prosecution show this question is relevant?" the Court said.
  "I waive, your Honor," the District Attorney said, glancing at the jury.
  When court adjourned for the day Goodwin said bitterly: "Well, you've said
  you would kill me someday, but I didn't think you meant it. I didn't think
  that you 11
  "Dont be a fool," Horace said. "Dont you see your case is won? That they
  are reduced to trying to impugn the character of your witness?" But when
  they left the jail he found the
            SANCTUARY            153
 woman still watching him from some deep reserve of foreboding. "You mustn't
 worry at all, I tell you. You may know more about making whiskey or love
 than I do, but I know more about criminal procedure than you, remember."
 "You dont think I made a mistake?"
  "I know you didn't. Dont you see how that explodes their case? The best
  they can hope for now is a hung jury. And the chances of that are not one
  in fifty. I tell you, he'll walk out of that jail tomorrow a free man."
 "Then I guess it's time to think about paying you."
 "Yes," Horace said, "all right. I'll come out tonight."
 "Tonight?"
  "Yes. He may call you back to the stand tomorrow. We'd better prepare for
  it, anyway."
  At eight o'clock he entered the mad woman's yard. A single light burned in
  the crazy depths of the house, like a firefly caught in a brier patch, but
  the woman did not appear when he called. He went to the door and knocked.
  A shrill voice shouted something; he waited a moment. He was about to knock
  again when he heard the voice again, shrill and wild and faint, as though
  from a distance, like a reedy pipe buried by an avalanche. He circled the
  house in the rank, waist-bigh weeds. The kitchen door was open. The lamp
  was there, dim in a smutty chimney, filling the room-a jumble of looming
  shapes rank with old foul female flesh-not with light but with shadow.
  White eyeballs rolled in a high, tight bullet head in brown gleams above a
  torn singlet strapped into overalls. Beyond the negro the mad woman turned
  in an open cupboard, brushing her lank hair back with her forearm.
 "Your bitch has gone to jail," she said. "Go on with her."
 "Jail?" Horace said.
  "That's what I said. Where the good folks live. When you get a husband,
  keep him in jail where he cant bother you." She turned to the negro, a
  small flask in her hand. "Come on, dearie. Give me a dollar for it. You got
  plenty money."
  Horace returned to town, to the jail. They admitted him. He mounted the
  stairs; the jailer locked a door behind him.
  The woman admitted him to the cell. The child lay on the cot. Goodwin sat
  beside it, his arms crossed, his legs extended in the attitude of a man in
  the last stage of physical exhaustion.
  "Why are you sitting there, in front of that slit?" Horace said. "Why not
  get into the corner, and we'll put the mattress over you."
  "You come to see it done, did you?" Goodwin said. "Well, that's no more
  than right. It's your job. You promised I wouldn't hang, didn't you?"
 154        WILLIAM FAULKNER

  "You've got an hour yet," Horace said. "The Memphis train doesn't get
  here until eight-thirty. He's surely got better sense than to come here
  in that canary-colored car." He turned to the woman. "But you. I thought
  better of you. I know that he and I are fools, but I expected better of
  you."
  "You're doing her a favor," Goodwin said. "She might have hung on with
  me until she was too old to hustle a good man. If you'll just promise to
  get the kid a newspaper grift when he's old enough to make change, I'll
  be easy in my mind."
  The woman had returned to the cot. She lifted the child onto her lap.
  Horace went to her. He said: "You come on, now. Nothing's going to
  happen. He'll be all right here. He knows it. You've got to go home and
  get some sleep, because you'll both be leaving here tomorrow. Come, now."
 "I reckon I better stay," she said.
  "Damn it, dont you know that putting yourself in the position for
  disaster is the surest way in the world to bring it about? Hasn't your
  own experience shown you that? Lee knows it. Lee, make her stop this."
 "Go on, Ruby," Goodwin said. "Go home and go to bed."
 "I reckon I better stay," she said.
  Horace stood over them. The woman mused above the child, her face bent
  and her whole body motionless. Goodwin leaned back against the wall, his
  brown wrists folded into the faded sleeves of his shirt. "You're a man
  now," Horace said. "Aren't you? I wish that jury could see you now,
  locked up in a concrete cell, scaring women and children with fifth grade
  ghost stories. They'd know you never had the guts to kill anybody."
  "You better go on and go to bed yourself," Goodwin said. "We could sleep
  here, if there wasn't so much noise."
  "No; that's too sensible for us to do," Horace said. He left the cell.
  The jailer unlocked the door for him and he quitted the building. In ten
  minutes he returned, with a parcel. G ' oodwin had not moved. The woman
  watched him open the package. It contained a bottle of milk, a box of
  candy, a box of cigars. He gave Goodwin one of the cigars and took one
  himself. "You brought his bottle, didn't you?"
  The woman produced the bottle from a bundle beneath the cot. "It's got
  some in it," she said. She filled it from the bottle. Horace lit his and
  Goodwin's cigars. When he looked again the bottle was gone.
 "Not time to feed him yet?" be said.
 "I'm warming it," the woman said.
  "Oh," Horace said. He tilted the chair against the wall, across the cell
  from the cot.
            SANCTUARY            155
  "Here's room on the bed," the woman said. "It's softer. Some."
 "Not enough to change, though," Horace said.
  "Look here," Goodwin said, "you go on home. No use in you doing this."
  "We've got a little work to do," Horace said. "That lawyer'll call her
  again in the morning. That's his only chance: to invalidate her testimony
  someway. You might try to get some sleep while we go over it."
 "All right," Goodwin said.
  Horace began to drill the woman, tramping back and forth upon the narrow
  floor. Goodwin finished his cigar and sat motionless again, his arms folded
  and his head bent. The clock above the square struck nine and then ten. The
  child whimpered, stirred. The woman stopped and changed it and took the
  bottle from beneath her flank and fed it. Then she leaned forward carefully
  and looked into Goodwin's face. "He's asleep," she whispered.
 "Shall we lay him down?" Horace whispered.
 "No. Let him stay there." Moving quietly she laid the child
 on the cot and moved herself to the other end of it. Horace
 carrie ' d the chair over beside her. They spoke in whispers.
  The clock struck eleven. Still Horace drilled her, going over and over the
  imaginary scene. At last he said: "I think that's all. Can you remember it,
  now? If he should ask you anything you cant answer in the exact words
  you've learned tonight, just say nothing for a moment. I'll attend to the
  rest. Can you remember, now?"
  "Yes," she whispered. He reached across and took the box of candy from the
  cot and opened it, the glazed paper crackling faintly. She took a piece.
  Goodwin had not moved. She looked at him, then at the narrow slit of
  window.
  "Stop that," Horace whispered. "He couldn't reach him through that window
  with a hat-pin, let alone a bullet. Dont you know that?"
  "Yes," she said. She held the bon-bon in her hand. She was not looking at
  him. "I know what you're thinking," she whispered.
 "What?"
  "When you got to the house and I wasn't there. I know what you're
  thinking." Horace watched her, her averted face. "You said tonight was the
  time to start paying you."
  For a while he looked at her. "Ah," he said. "0 temporal 0 mores! 0 bell!
  Can you stupid mammals never believe that any man, every man- You thought
  that was what I was coming for? You thought that if I had intended to, I'd
  have waited this long?"
 156        WILLIAM FAULKNER

  She looked at him briefly. "It wouldn't have done you any good if you
  hadn't waited."
 "What? Oh. Well. But you would have tonight?"
 "I thought that was what-"
  "You would now, then?" She looked around at Goodwin. He was snoring a
  little. "Oh, I dont mean right this minute," he whispered. "But you'll pay
  on demand."
  "I thought that was what you meant. I told you we didn't have- If that aint
  enough pay, I dont know that I blame you.
  "It's not that. You know it's not that. But cant you see that perhaps a man
  might do something just because he knew it was right, necessary to the
  harmony of things that it be done?"
  The woman turned the bon-bon slowly in her hand. "I thought you were mad
  about him."
 "Lee?"
  "No. Him." She touched the child. "Because I'd have to bring him with us."
  "You mean, with him at the foot of the bed, maybe? perhaps you holding him
  by the leg all the time, so he wouldn't fall off?"
  She looked at him, her eyes grave and blank and contemplative. Outside the
  clock struck twelve.
  "Good God," he whispered. "What kind of men have you known?"
  "I got him out of jail once that way. Out of Leavenworth, too. When they
  knew he was guilty."
  "You did?" Horace said. "Here. Take another piece. That one's about worn
  out." She looked down at her chocolatestained fingers and the shapeless
  bon-bon. She dropped it behind the cot. Horace extended his handkerchief.
  "It'll soil it," she said. "Wait." She wiped her fingers on the child's
  discarded garment and sat again, her hands clasped in her lap. Goodwin was
  snoring regularly. "When he went to the Philippines he left me in San
  Francisco. I got a job and I lived in a hall room, cooking over a gas-jet,
  because I told him I would. I didn't know how long he'd be gone, but I
  promised him I would and he knew I would. When he killed that other soldier
  over that nigger woman, I didn't even know it. I didn't get a letter from
  him for five months. It was just when I happened to see an old newspaper I
  was spreading on a closet shelf in the place where I worked that I saw the
  regiment was coming home, and when I looked at the calendar it was that
  day. I'd been good all that time. I'd had good chances; every day I had
  them with the men coming in the restaurant.
  "They wouldn't let me off to go and meet the ship, so I had to quit. Then
  they wouldn't let me see him, wouldn't even let
            SANCTUARY            157

 me on the ship. I stood there while they came marching off it, watching
 for him and asking the ones that passed if they kne'Ov where he was and
 them kidding me if I had a date that night, telling me they never heard
 of him or that he was dead or he had run off to Japan with the colonel's
 wife. I tried to get on the ship again, but they wouldn't let me. So that
 night I dressed up and went to the cabarets until I found one of them and
 let him pick me up, and he told me. It was like I had died. I sat there
 with the music playing and all, and that drunk soldier pawing at me, and
 me wondering why I didn't let go, go on with him, get drunk and never
 sober up again and me thinking And this is the sort of animal I wasted a
 year over. I guess that was why I didn't.
  "Anyway, I didn't. I went back to my room and the next day I started
  looking for him. I kept on, with them telling me lies and trying to make
  me, until I found he was in Leavenworth. I didn't have enough money for
  a ticket, so I had to get another job. It took two months to get enough
  money. Then I went to Leavenworth. I got another job as waitress, in
  Childs', nightshifts, so I could see Lee every other Sunday afternoon.
  We decided to get a lawyer. We didn't know that a lawyer couldn't do
  anything for a federal prisoner. The lawyer didn't tell me, and I hadn't
  told Lee how I was getting the lawyer. He thought I had saved some money.
  I lived with the lawyer two months before I found it out.
  "Then the war came and they let Lee out and sent him to France. I went
  to New York and got a job in a munitions plant. I stayed straight too,
  with the cities full of soldiers with money to spend, and even the little
  ratty girls wearing silk, But I stayed straight. Then he came home. I was
  at the ship to meet him. He got off under arrest and they sent him back
  to Leavenworth for killing that soldier three years ago. Then I got a
  lawyer to get a Congressman to get him out. I gave him all the money I
  had saved too. So when Lee got out, we had nothing. He said we'd get
  married, but we couldn't afford it. And when I told him about the lawyer,
  he beat me."
  Again she dropped a shapeless piece of eandy behind the cot and wiped her
  hands on the garment. She chose another piece from the box and ate it.
  Chewing, she looked at Horace, turning upon him with a blank, musing gaze
  for an unhurried moment. Through the slotted window the darkness came
  chill and dead.
 Goodwin ceased snoring. He stirred and sat up.
 "What time is it?" he said.
  "What?" Horace said. He looked at his watch. "Half-past two."
 158        WILLIAM FAULKNER

 "He must have had a puncture," Goodwin said.
  Toward dawn Horace himself slept, sitting in the chair. When he waked a
  narrow rosy pencil of sunlight fell level through the window. Goodwin and
  the woman were talking quietly on the cot. Goodwin looked at him bleakly.
 "Morning," he said.
 "I hope you slept off that nightmare of yours," Horace said.
  "If I did, it's the last one I'll have. They say you dont dream there."
  "You've certainly done enough not to miss it," Horace said. "I suppose
  you'll believe us, after this."
  "Believe, hell," Goodwin said, who had sat so quiet, so contained, with
  his saturnine face, negligent in his overalls and blue shirt; "do you
  think for one minute that man is going to let me walk out of that door
  and up the street and into that courthouse, after yesterday? What sort
  of men have you lived with all your life? In a nursery? I wouldn't do
  that, myself."
 "If he does, he has sprung his own trap," Horace said.
 "What good will that do me? Let me tell-"
 "Lee," the woman said.
  -"you something: the next time you want to play dice with a man's neck-"
  "Lee," she said. She was stroking her hand slowly on his head, back and
  forth. She began to smooth his hair into a part, patting his collarless
  shirt smooth. Horace watched them.
  "Would you like to stay here today?" he said quietly. "I can fix it."
  "No," Goodwin said. "I'm sick of it. I'm going to get it over with. Just
  tell that goddamned deputy not to walk too close to me. You and her
  better go and eat breakfast."
 "I'm not hungry," the woman said.
 "You go on like I told you," Goodwin said.
 "Lee. 11
 "Come," Horace said. "You can come back afterward."
  Outside, in the fresh morning, he began to breathe deeply. "Fill your
  lungs," he said. "A night in that place would give anyone the jim-jams.
  The idea of three grown people . . . My Lord, sometimes I believe that
  we are all children, except children themselves. But today will be the
  last. By noon he'll walk out of there a free man: do you realise that?"
  They walked on in the fresh sunlight, beneath the high, soft sky. High
  against the blue fat little clouds blew up from the south-west, and the
  cool steady breeze shivered and twinkled in the locusts where the blooms
  had long since fallen.
 "I dont know how you'll get paid," she said.
 "Forget it. I've been paid. You wont understand it, but
            SANCTUARY            159
 my soul has served an apprenticeship that has lasted for fortythree years.
 Forty-three years. Half again as long as you have lived. So you see that
 folly, as well as poverty, cares for its own."
 "And you know that he-that-"
  "Stop it, now. We dreamed that away, too. God is foolish at times, but
  at least He's a gentleman. Dont you know that?"
 "I always thought of Him as a man," the woman said.

  The bell was already ringing when Horace crossed the square toward the
  courthouse. Already the square was filled with wagons and cars and the
  overalls and khaki thronged slowly beneath the gothic entrance ot the
  building. Overhead the clock was striking nine as he mounted the stairs.
  The broad double doors at the head of the cramped stair were open. From
  beyond them came a steady preliminary stir of people settling themselves.
  Above the seat-backs Horace could see their heads-bald heads, gray heads,
  shaggy heads and heads trimmed to recent feather-edge above sunbaked
  necks, oiled heads above urban collars and here and there a sunbonnet or
  a flowered hat.
  The hum of their voices and movements came back upon the steady draft
  which blew through the door. The air entered the open windows and blew
  over the heads and back to Horace in the door, laden with smells of
  tobacco and stale sweat and the earth and with that unmistakable odor of
  courtrooms; that musty odor of spent lusts and greeds and bickerings and
  bitterness, and withal a certain clumsy stability in lieu of anything
  better. The windows gave upon balconies close under the arched porticoes.
  The breeze drew through them, bearing the chirp and coo of sparrows and
  pigeons that nested in the eaves, and now and then the sound of a motor
  horn from the square below, rising out of and sinking back into a hollow
  rumble of feet in the corridor below and on the stairs.
  The Bench was empty. At one side, at the long table, he could see
  Goodwin's black head and gaunt brown face, and the woman's gray hat. At
  the other end of the table sat a man picking his teeth. His skull was
  capped closely by tightlycurled black hair thinning upon a bald spot. He
  had a long, pale nose. He wore a tan palm beach suit; upon the table near
  him lay a smart leather brief-case and a straw hat with a red-and-tan
  band, and he gazed lazily out a window above the ranked heads, picking
  his teeth. Horace stopped just within the door. "It's a lawyer," he said.
  "A Jew lawyer from Memphis." Then he was looking at the backs of the
  heads about the table, where the witnesses and such would be. "I know
 160        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 what I'll find before I find it," he said. "She will have on a black hat."
  He walked up the aisle. From beyond the balcony window where the sound of
  the bell seemed to be and where beneath the eaves the guttural pigeons
  crooned, the voice of the bailiff came:
  "The honorable Circuit Court of Yoknapatawpha county is now open according
  to law. . . ."
  Temple had on a black hat. The clerk called her name twice before she moved
  and took the stand. After a while Horace realised that he was being spoken
  to, a little testily, by the Court.
 "Is this your witness, Mr. Benbow?"
 "It is, your Honor."
 "You wish her sworn and recorded?"
 "I do, your Honor."
  Beyond the window, beneath the unhurried pigeons, the bailiff's voice still
  droned, reiterant, importunate, and detached, though the sound of the bell
  had ceased.

              XXV111

 THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY FACED THE JURY. "I OFFER AS EVIdence this object which
 was found at the scene of the crime." He held in his hand a corn-cob. It
 appeared to have been dipped in dark brownish paint. "The reason this was
 not offered sooner is that its bearing on the case was not made clear until
 the testimony of the defendant's wife which I have just caused to be read
 aloud to you gentlemen from the record.
  "You have just heard the testimony of the chemist and the gynecologist-who
  is, as you gentlemen know, an authority on the most sacred affairs of that
  most sacred thing in life: womanhood-who says that this is no longer a
  matter for the hangman, but for a bonfire of gasoline-"
  "I object!" Horace said: "The prosecution is attempting to sway-"
  "Sustained," the Court said. "Strike out the phrase beginning 'who says
  that,' mister clerk. You may instruct the jury to disregard it, Mr. Benbow.
  Keep to the matter in hand, Mr. District Attorney."
  The District Attorney bowed. He turned to the witness stand, where Temple
  sat. From beneath her black hat her hair escaped in tight red curls like
  clots of resin. The hat bore a rhinestone ornament. Upon her black satin
  lap lay a platinum bag. Her pate tan coat was open upon a shoulder knot of
  purple. Her hands lay motionless, palm-up on her lap. Her long blonde legs
  slanted, lax-ankled, her two motionless slip-
              SANCTUARY            161
 pers with their glittering buckles lay on their sides as though empty.
 Above the ranked intent faces white and pallid as the floating bellies of
 dead fish, she sat in an attitude at once detached and cringing, her gaze
 fixed on something at the back of the room. Her face was quite pale, the
 two spots of rouge like paper discs pasted on her cheek bones, her mouth
 painted into a savage and perfect bow, also like something both symbolical
 and cryptic cut carefully from purple paper and pasted there.
 The District Attorney stood before her.
  "What is your name?" She did not answer. She moved her head slightly, as
  though he had obstructed her view, gazing at something in the back of the
  room. "What is your name?" he repeated, moving also, into the line of her
  vision again. Her mouth moved. "Louder," he said. "Speak out. No one will
  hurt you. Let these good men, these fathers and husbands, hear what you
  have to say and right your wrong for you."
  The Court glanced at Horace, his eyebrows raised. But Horace made no
  move. He sat with his head bent a little, his hands clutched in his lap.
 "Temple Drake," Temple said.
 "Your age?"
 "Eighteen."
 "Where is your home?"
 "Memphis," she said in a scarce distinguishable voice.
  "Speak a little louder. These men will not hurt you. They are here to
  right the wrong you have suffered. Where did you live before you went to
  Memphis?"
 "In Jackson."
 "Have you relations there?"
 "Yes.
 "Come. Tell these good men--?'
 "My father."
 "Your mother is dead?"
 "Yes."
 "Have you any sisters?"
 "No.
 "You are your father's only daughter?"
 Again the Court looked at Horace; again he made no move. "Yes.,'
  "Where have you been living since May twelfth of this year?" Her head
  moved faintly, as though she would see beyond him. He moved into her line
  of vision, holding her eyes. She stared at him again, giving her
  parrotlike answers.
 "Did your father know you were there?"
 'No.
 "Where did he think you were?"
 162        WILLIAM FAULKNER

 "He thought I was in school."
  "You were in hiding, then, because something had happened to you and you
  dared not-"
 "I object!" Horace said. "The question is lead-"
  "Sustained," the Court said. "I have been on the point of warning you for
  some time, Mr. Attorney, but defendant would not take exception for some
  reason."
  The District Attorney bowed toward the Bench. He turned to the witness and
  held her eyes again.
 "Where were you on Sunday morning, May twelfth?"
 "I was in the crib."
  The room sighed, its collective breath hissing in the musty silence. Some
  newcomers entered, but they stopped at the rear of the room in a clump and
  stood there. Temple's head had moved again. The District Attorney caught
  her gaze and held it. He half turned and pointed at Goodwin.
  "Did you ever see that man before?" She gazed at the District Attorney, her
  face quite rigid, empty. From a short distance her eyes, the two spots of
  rouge and her mouth, were like five meaningless objects in a small
  heart-shaped dish. "Look where I am pointing."
 "Yes.,,
 "Where did you see him?"
 "In the crib."
 "What were you doing in the crib?"
 "I was hiding."
 "Who were you hiding from?"
 "From him."
 "That man there? Look where I am pointing."
 "Yes.,,
 "But he found you."
 "Yes.,,
 "Was anyone else there?"
 "Tommy was. He said-"
 "Was he inside the crib or outside?"
  "He was outside by the door. He was watching. He said he wouldn't let--"
 "Just a minute. Did you ask him not to let anyone in?" "Yes.,,
 "And he locked the door on the outside?"
 "Yes.
 "But Goodwin came in."
 "Yes.
 "Did he have anything in his hand?"
 "He had the pistol."
 "Did Tommy try to stop him?"
 "Yes. He said he "
            SANCTUARY            163
 "Wait. What did he do to Tommy?"
 She gazed at him.
 "He had the pistol in his hand. What did he do then?"
  "He shot him." The District Attorney stepped aside. At once the girl's
  gaze went to the back of the room and became fixed there. The District
  Attorney returned, stepped into her line of vision. She moved her head;
  he caught her gaze and held it and lifted the stained corncob before her
  eyes. The room sighed, a long hissing breath. "Did you ever see this
  before?"
 "Yes."
  The District Attorney turned away. "Your honor and gentlemen, you have
  listened to this horrible, this unbelievable, story which this young girt
  has told you; you have seen the evidence and heard the doctor's
  testimony; I shall no longer subject this ruined, defenseless child to
  the agony of-" he ceased; the heads turned as one and watched a man come
  stalking up the aisle toward the Bench. He walked steadily, paced and
  followed by a slow gaping of the small white faces, a slow hissing of
  collars. He had neat white hair and a clipped moustache like a bar of
  hammered silver against his dark skin. His eyes were pouched a little.
  A small paunch was buttoned snugly into his immaculate linen suit. He
  carried a panama hat in one hand and a slender black stick in the other.
  He walked steadily up the aisle in a slow expulsion of silence like a
  prolonged sigh, looking to neither side. He passed the witness stand
  without a glance at the witness, who still gazed at something in the back
  of the room, walking right through her line of vision like a runner
  crossing a tape, and stopped before the bar above which the Court had
  half-risen, his arms on the desk.
  "Your Honor," the old man said, "is the Court done with this witness?"
  "Yes, sir, Judge," the Court said; "yes, sir. Defendant, do you waive-"
  The old man turned slowly, erect above the held breaths, the little white
  faces, and looked down at the six people at the counsel table. Behind him
  the witness had not moved. She sat in her attitude of childish
  immobility, gazing like a drugged person above the faces, toward the rear
  of the room. The old man turned to her and extended his hand. She did not
  move. The room expelled its breath, sucked it quickly in and held it
  again. The old man touched her arm. She turned her head toward him, her
  eyes blank and all pupil above the three savage spots of rouge. She put
  her hand in his and rose, the platinum bag slipping from her lap to the
  floor with a thin clash, gazing again at the back of the room. With the
  toe of his
 164        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 small gleaming shoe the old man flipped the bag into the corner where the
 jury-box joined the Bench, where a spittoon sat, and steadied her down
 from the dais. The room breathed again as they moved on down the aisle.
  Half way down the aisle the girl stopped again, slender in her smart open
  coat, her blank face rigid, then she moved on, her hand in the old man's.
  They returned down the aisle, the old man erect beside her, looking to
  neither side, paced by that slow whisper of collars. Again the girl
  stopped. She began to cringe back, her body arching slowly, her arm
  tautening in the old man's grasp. He bent toward her, speaking; she moved
  again, in that shrinking and rapt abasement. Four younger men were
  standing stiffly erect near the exit. They stood like soldiers, staring
  straight ahead until the old man and the girl reached them. Then they
  moved and surrounded the other two, and in a close body, the girl hidden
  among them, they moved toward the door. Here they stopped again; the girl
  could be seen shrunk against the wall just inside the door, her body
  arched again. She appeared to be clinging there, then the five bodies hid
  her again and again in a close body the group passed through the door and
  disappeared. The room breathed: a buzzing sound like a wind getting up.
  It moved forward with a slow increasing rush, on above the long table
  where the prisoner and the woman with the child and Horace and the
  District Attorney and the Memphis lawyer sat, and across the jury and
  against the Bench in a long sigh. The Memphis lawyer was sitting on his
  spine, gazing dreamily out the window. The child made a fretful sound,
  whimpering.
 "Hush," the woman said. "Shhhhhhhh."

               XXIX

 THE JURY WAS OUT EIGHT MINUTES. WHEN HORACE LEFT THE courthouse it was
 getting toward dusk. The tethered wagons were taking out, some of them to
 face twelve and sixteen miles of country road. Narcissa was waiting for
 him in the car. He emerged among the overalls, slowly; he got into the car
 stiffly, like an old man, with a drawn face. "Do you want to go home?"
 Narcissa said.
 "Yes," Horace said.
 "I mean, to the house, or out home?"
 "Yes," Horace said.
  She was driving the car, the engine was running, She looked at him, in
  a dark dress with a severe white collar, a dark hat.
 "Which one?"
 "Home," he said. "I dont care. Just home."
 They passed the jail. Standing along the fence were the
            SANCTUARY           165
 loafers, the countrymen, the blackguard boys and youths who had followed
 Goodwin and the deputy from the courthouse. Beside the gate the woman stood,
 in the gray hat with the veil, carrying the child in her arms. "Standing
 where he can see it through the window," Horace said. "I smell ham, too.
 Maybe he'll be eating ham before we get home." Then he began to cry, sitting
 in the car beside his sister. She drove steadily, not fast. Soon they had
 left the town and the stout rows of young cotton swung at either hand in
 parallel and diminishing retrograde. There was still a little snow of locust
 blooms on the mounting drive. "It does last," Horace said. "Spring does.
 You'd almost think there was some purpose to it."
  He stayed to supper. He ate a lot. "I'll go and see about your room," his
  sister said, quite gently.
  "All right," Horace said. "It's nice of you." She went out. Miss Jenny's
  wheel chair sat on a platform slotted for the wheels. "It's nice of her,"
  Horace said. "I think I'll go outside and smoke my pipe."
  "Since when have you quit smoking it in here?" Miss Jenny said.
  "Yes," Horace said. "It was nice of her." He walked across the porch. "I
  intended to stop here," Horace said. He watched himself cross the porch and
  then tread the diffident snow of the last locusts; he turned out of the
  iron gates, onto the gravel. After about a mile a car slowed and offered
  him a ride. "I'm just walking before supper," he said; "I'll turn back
  soon." After another mile he could see the lights of town. It was a faint
  glare, low and close. It got stronger as he approached. Before he reached
  town he began to hear the sound, the voices. Then he saw the people, a
  shifting mass filling the street, and the bleak, shallow yard above which
  the square and slotted bulk of the jail loomed. In the yard, beneath the
  barred window, a man in his shirt sleeves faced the crowd, hoarse, ges-
  ticulant. The barred window was empty.
  Horace went on toward the square. The sheriff was among the drummers before
  the hotel, standing along the curb. He was a fat man, with a broad, dull
  face which belied the expression of concern about his eyes. "They won't do
  anything," he said. "There is too much talk. Noise. And too early. When a
  mob means business, it dont take that much time and talk. And it dont go
  about its business where every man can see it."
  The crowd stayed in the street until late. It was quite orderly, though. It
  was as though most of them had come to see, to look at the jail and the
  barred window, or to listen to the man in shirt sleeves. After a while he
  talked himself out. Then they began to move away, back to the square and
 166        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 some of them homeward, until there was left only a small group beneath the
 arc light at the entrance to the square, among whom were two temporary
 deputies, and the night marshal in a broad pale hat, a flash light, a time
 clock and a pistol. "Git on home now," he said. "Show's over. You boys done
 had your fun. Git on home to bed, now."
  The drummers sat a while longer along the curb before the hotel, Horace
  among them; the south-bound train ran at one o'clock. "They're going to let
  him get away with it, are they?" a drummer said. "With that corn cob? What
  kind of folks have you got here? What does it take to make you folks mad?"
  "He wouldn't a never got to trial, in my town," a second said.
 "To jail, even," a third said. "Who was she?"
 "College girl. Good looker. Didn't you see her?"
  "I saw her. She was some baby. Jeez. I wouldn't have used no cob."
  Then the square was quiet. The clock struck eleven; the drummers went in
  and the negro porter came and turned the chairs back into the wall. "You
  waiting for the train?" he said to Horace.
 "Yes. Have you got a report on it yet?"
  "It's on time. But that's two hours yet. You could lay down in the Sample
  Room, if you want."
 "Can IT' Horace said.
  "I'll show you," the negro said. The Sample Room was where the drummers
  showed their wares. It contained a sofa. Horace turned off the light and
  lay down on the sofa. He could see the trees about the courthouse, and one
  wing of the building rising above the quiet and empty square. But people
  were not asleep. He could feel the wakefulness, the people awake about the
  town. "I could not have gone to sleep, anyway," he said to himself.
  He heard the clock strike twelve. Then-it might have been thirty minutes or
  maybe longer than that-he heard someone pass under the window, running. The
  runner's feet sounded louder than a horse, echoing across the empty square,
  the peaceful hours given to sleeping. It was not a sound Horace heard now;
  it was something in the air which the sound of the running feet died into.
  When he went down the corridor toward the stairs he did not know he was
  running until he heard beyond a door a voice say, "Fire! it's a . . ." Then
  he passed it. "I scared him," Horace said. "He's just from Saint Louis,
  maybe, and he's not used to this." He ran out of the hotel, onto the
  street. Ahead of him the proprietor had just run, ludicrous; a broad man
  with his trousers clutched before him and his braces
            SANCTUARY            167
 dangling beneath his nightshirt, a tousled fringe of hair standing wildly
 about his bald head; three other men passed the hotel running. They appeared
 to come from nowhere, to emerge in midstride out of nothingness, fully
 dressed in the middle of the street, running.
  "It is a fire," Horace said. He could see the glare; against it the jail
  loomed in stark and savage silhouette.
  "It's in that vacant lot," the proprietor said, clutching his trousers. "I
  cant go because there aint anybody on the desk . . . ...
  Horace ran. Ahead of him he saw other figures running, turning into the
  alley beside the jail; then he heard the sound of the fire; the furious
  sound of gasoline. He turned into the alley. He could see the blaze, in the
  center of a vacant lot where on market days wagons were tethered. Against
  the flames black figures showed, antic; he could hear panting shouts;
  through a fleeting gap he saw a man turn and run, a mass of flames, still
  carrying a five-gallon coal oil can which exploded with a rocket-like glare
  while he carried it, running.
  He ran into the throng, into the circle which had formed about a blazing
  mass in the middle of the lot. From one side of the circle came the screams
  of the man about whom the coal oil can had exploded, but from the central
  mass of fire there came no sound at all. It was now indistinguishable, the
  flames whirling in long and thunderous plumes from a whitehot mass out of
  which there defined themselves faintly the ends of a few posts and planks.
  Horace ran among them; they were holding him, but he did not know it; they
  were talking, but he could not hear the voices.
 "It's his lawyer."
  "Here's the man that defended him. That tried to get him clear."
 "Put him in, too. There's enough left to burn a lawyer."
  "Do to the lawyer what we did to him. What he did to her. Only we never
  used a cob. We made him wish we had used a cob."
  Horace couldn't hear them. He couldn't hear the man who had got burned
  screaming. He couldn't hear the fire, though it still swirled upward
  unabated, as though it were living upon itself, and soundless: a voice of
  fury like in a dream, roaring silently out of a peaceful void.

               XXX

 THE TRAINS AT KINSTON WERE MET 13Y AN OLD MAN WHO drove a seven passenger
 car. He was thin, with gray eyes and a gray moustache with waxed ends. In
 the old days, before
 168        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 the town boomed suddenly into a lumber town, he was a planter, a landholder,
 son of one of the first settlers. He lost his property through greed and
 gullibility, and he began to drive a hack back and forth between town and
 the trains, with his waxed moustache, in a top hat and a worn Prince Albert
 coat, telling the drummers how he used to lead Kinston society; now he drove
 it.
  After the horse era passed, he bought a car, still meeting the trains. He
  still wore his waxed moustache, though the top hat was replaced by a cap,
  the frock coat by a suit of gray striped with red made by Jews in the New
  York tenement district. "Here you are," he said, when Horace descended from
  the train. "Put your bag into the car," he said. He got in himself. Horace
  got into the front seat beside him. "You are one train late," he said.
 "Late?" Horace said.
 "She got in this morning. I took her home. Your wife."
 "Oh," Horace said. "She's home?"
  The other started the car and backed and turned. It was a good, powerful
  car, moving easily. "When did you expect her? . . ." They went on. "I see
  where they burned that fellow over at Jefferson. I guess you saw it."
 "Yes," Horace said. "Yes. I heard about it."
  "Served him right," the driver said. "We got to protect our girls. Might
  need them ourselves."
  They turned. following a street. There was a corner, beneath an arc light.
  "I'll get out here," Horace said.
 "I'll take you on to the door," the driver said.
 "I'll get out here," Horace said. "Save you having to turn."
  "Suit yourself," the driver said. "You're paying for it, anyway.
  Horace got out and lifted out his suit case; the driver did not offer to
  touch it. The car went on. Horace picked up the suit case, the one which
  had stayed in the closet at his sister's home for ten years and which he
  had brought into town with him on the morning when she had asked him the
  name of the District Attorney.
  His house was new, on a fairish piece of lawn, the trees, the poplars and
  maples which he had set out, still new. Before he reached the house, he saw
  the rose colored shade at his wife's windows. He entered the house from the
  back and came to her door and looked into the room. She was reading in bed,
  a broad magazine with a colored back. The lamp had a rose colored shade. On
  the table sat a box of chocolates.
 "I came back," Horace said.
 She looked at him across the magazine.
 "Did you lock the back door?" she said.
            SANCTUARY            169
  "Yes, I knew she would be," Horace said. "Have you tonight . . ."
 "Have I what?"
 "Little Belle. Did you telephone
  "What for? She's at that house party. Why shouldn't she be? Why should she
  have to disrupt her plans, refuse an invitation?"
 "Yes," Horace said. "I knew she would be. Did you
 "I talked to her night before last. Go lock the back door."
  "Yes," Horace said. "She's all right. Of course she is. I'll just . . ."
  The telephone sat on a table in the dark hall. The number was on a rural
  line; it took some time. Horace sat beside the telephone. He had left the
  door at the end of the hall open. Through it the light airs of the summer
  night drew, vague, disturbing. "Night is hard on old people," he said
  quietly, holding the receiver. "Summer nights are hard on them. Something
  should be done about it. A law."
  From her room Belle called his name, in the voice of a reclining person. "I
  called her night before last. Why must you bother her?"
 "I know," Horace said. "I wont be long at it."
  He held the receiver, looking at the door through which the vague,
  troubling wind came. He began to say something out of a book he had read:
  "Less oft is peace. Less oft is peace," he said.
 The wire answered. "Hellol Hello! Belle?" Horace said.
  "Yes?" her voice came back thin and faint. "What is it? Is anything wrong?"
  "No, no." Horace said. "I just wanted to tell you hello and good-night."
  "Tell what? What is it? Who is speaking?" Horace held the receiver, sitting
  in the dark hall.
 "It's me, Horace. Horace. I just wanted to-2'
  Over the thin wire came a scuffling sound; he could hear Little Belle
  breathe. Then a voice said, a masculine voice: "Hello, Horace; I want you
  to meet a-"
  "Hush!" Little Belle's voice said, thin and faint; again Horace heard them
  scuffling; a breathless interval. "Stop it!" Little Belle's voice said.
  "It's Horace! I live with him!" Horace held the receiver to his ear. Little
  Belle's voice was breathless, controlled, cool, discreet, detached. "Hello,
  Horace. Is Mamma all right?"
 "Yes. We're all right. I just wanted to tell you
 "Oh. Good-night."
 "Good-night. Are you having a good time?"
  "Yes. Yes. I'll write tomorrow. Didn't Mamma get my letter today?"
 170        WILLIAM FAULKNER
  "I dont know. I just-"
  "Maybe I forgot to mail it. I wont forget tomorrow, though. I'll write
  tomorrow. Was that all you wanted?"
  "Yes. Just wanted to tell you . . ."
  He put the receiver back; he heard the wire die. The light from his
  wife's room fell across the haH. "Lock the back door," she said.
                xxxi

 WHILE ON HIS WAY TO PENSACOLA TO VISIT HIS MOTHER, Popeye was arrested in
 Birmingham for the murder of a policeman in a small Alabama town on June
 17 of that year. He was arrested in August. It was on the night of June
 17 that Temple had passed him sitting in the parked car beside the road
 house on the night when Red had been killed.
  Each summer Popeye went to see his mother. She thought he was a night
  clerk in a Memphis hotel.
  His mother was the daughter of a boarding house keeper. His father had
  been a professional strike-breaker hired by the street railway company
  to break a strike in 1900. His mother at that time was working in a
  department store downtown. For three nights she rode home on the car
  beside the motorman's seat on which Popeye's father rode. One night the
  strike-breaker got off at her corner with her and walked to her home.
 "Wont you get fired?" she said.
  "By who?" the strike-breaker said. They walked along together. He was
  well-dressed. "Them others would take me that quick. They know it, too."
 "Who would take you?"
  "The strikers. I dont care a damn who is running the car, see. I'll ride
  with one as soon as another. Sooner, if I could make this route every
  night at this time."
 She walked beside him. "You dont mean that," she said.
 "Sure I do." He took her arm.
  "I guess you'd just as soon be married to one as another, the same way."
  "Who told you that?" he said. "Have them bastards been talking about me?"
  A month later she told them that they would have to be married. "How do
  you mean, have to?" he said.
 "I dont dare tell them. I have to go away. I dont dare."
  "Well, dont get upset. I'd just as lief. I have to pass here every night
  anyway."
  They were married. He would pass the corner at night. He would ring the
  foot-bell. Sometimes he would come home. He would give her money. Her
  mother liked him; he would
            SANCTUARY            171
 come roaring into the house at dinner time on Sunday, calling the other
 clients, even the old ones, by their first names. Then one day he didn't
 come back; he didn't ring the foot-bell when the trolley passed. The strike
 was over by then. She had a Christmas card from him; a picture, with a bell
 and an embossed wreath in gilt, from a Georgia town. It said: "The boys
 trying to fix it up here. But these folks awful slow. Will maybe move on
 until we strike a good town ha ha." The word, strike, was underscored.
  Three weeks after her marriage, she had begun to ail. She was pregnant
  then. She did not go to a doctor, because an old negro woman told her what
  was wrong. Popeye was born on the Christmas day on which the card was
  received. At first they thought he was blind. Then they found that he was
  not blind, although he did not learn to walk and talk until he was about
  four years old. In the meantime, the second husband of her mother, an
  undersized, snuffy man with a mild, rich, moustache, who pottered about the
  house-he fixed all the broken steps and leaky drains and such-left home one
  afternoon with a check signed in blank to pay a twelve dollar butcher's
  bill. He never came back. He drew from the bank his wife's fourteen hundred
  dollar savings account, and disappeared.
  The daughter was still working down town, while her mother tended the
  child. One afternoon one of the clients returned and found his room on
  fire. He put it out; a week later he found a smudge in his waste-basket.
  The grandmother was tending the child. She carried it about with her. One
  evening she was not in sight. The whole household turned out. A neighbor
  turned in a fire alarm and the firemen found the grandmother in the attic,
  stamping out a fire in a handful of excelsior in the center of the floor,
  the child asleep in a discarded mattress nearby.
  "Tbem bastards are trying to get him," the old woman said. "They set the
  house on fire." The next day, all the clients left.
  The young woman quit her job. She stayed at home all the time. "You ought
  to get out and get some air," the grandmother said.
 "I get enough air," the daughter said.
  "You could go out and buy the groceries," the mother said. "You could buy
  them cheaper."
 "We get them cheap enough."
  She would watch all the fires; she would not have a match in the house. She
  kept a few bidden behind a brick in the outside wall. Popeye was three
  years old then. He looked about one, though he could eat pretty well. A
  doctor had told his mother to feed him eggs cooked in olive oil. One after-
  noon the grocer's boy, entering the area-way on a bicycle,
 172        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 skidded and fell. Something leaked from the package. "It aint eggs," the boy
 said. "See?" It was a bottle of olive oil. "You ought to buy that oil in
 cans anyway," the boy said. "He cant tell no difference in it. I'll bring
 you another one. And you want to have that gate fixed. Do you want I should
 break my neck on it?"
  He had not returned by six o'clock. It was summer. There was no fire, not
  a match in the house. "I'll be back in five minutes," the daughter said.
  She left the house. The grandmother watched her disappear. Then she wrapped
  the child up in a light blanket and left the house. The street was a side
  street, just off a main street where there were markets, where the rich
  people in limousines stopped on the way home to shop. When she reached the
  corner, a car was just drawing in to the curb. A woman got out and entered
  a store, leaving a negro driver behind the wheel. She went to the car.
 "I want a half a dollar," she said.
 The negro looked at her. "A which?"
 "A half a dollar. The boy busted the bottle.,,
  "Oh," the negro said. He reached in his pocket. "How am I going to keep it
  straight, with you collecting out here? Did she send you for the money out
  here?"
 "I want a half a dollar. He busted the bottle."
  "I reckon I better go in, then," the negro said. "Seem like to me you folks
  would see that folks got what they buy, folks that been trading here long
  as we is."
  "It's a half a dollar," the woman said. He gave her a half dollar and
  entered the store. The woman watched him. Then she laid the child on the
  seat of the car, and followed the negro. It was a self-serve place, where
  the customers moved slowly along a railing in single file. The negro was
  next to the white woman who had left the car. The grandmother watched the
  woman pass back to the negro a loose handful of bottles of sauce and
  catsup. "That'll be a dollar and a quarter," she said. The negro gave her
  the money. She took it and passed them and crossed the room. There was a
  bottle of imported Italian olive oil, with a price tag. "I got twentyeight
  cents more," she said. She moved on, watching the price tags, until she
  found one that said twenty-eight cents. It was seven bars of bath soap.
  With the two parcels she left the store. There was a policeman at the
  corner. "I'm out of matches," she said.
  The policeman dug into his pocket. "Why didn't you buy some while you were
  there?" he said.
 "I just forgot it. You know how it is, shopping with a child."
 "Where is the child?" the policeman said.
            SANCTUARY           173
 "I traded it in," the woman said.
  "You ought to be in vaudeville," the policeman said. "How many matches
  do you want? I aint got but one or two."
  "Just one," the woman said. "I never do light a fire with but one."
  "You ougbt to be in vaudeville," the policeman said. "You'd bring down
  the house."
 "I am," the woman said. "I bring down the house."
 "What house?" He looked at her. "The poor house?"
  "I'll bring it down," the woman said. "You watch the papers tomorrow. I
  hope they get my name right."
 "What's your name? Calvin Coolidge?"
 "No, sir. That's my boy,"
  "Oh. That's why you had so much trouble shopping, is it? You ought to be
  in vaudeville. . . . Will two matches be enough?"
  They had had three alarms from that address, so they didn't hurry. The
  first to arrive was the daughter. The door was locked, and when the
  firemen came and chopped it down, the house was already gutted. The
  grandmother was leaning out an upstairs window through which the smoke
  already curled. "Them bastards," she said. "They thought they would get
  him. But I told them I would show them. I told them so."
  The mother thought that Popeye had perished also. They held her,
  shrieking, while the shouting face of the grandmother vanished into the
  smoke, and the shell of the house caved in; that was where the woman and
  the policeman carrying the child, found her: a young woman with a wild
  face, her mouth open, looking at the child with a vague air, scouring her
  loose hair slowly upward from her temples with both hands. She never
  wholly recovered. What with the hard work and the lack of fresh air,
  diversion, and the disease, the legacy which her brief husband had left
  her, she was not in any condition to stand shock, and there were times
  when she still believed that the child had perished, even though she held
  it in her arms crooning above it.
  Popeye might well have been dead. He had no hair at all until he was five
  years old, by which time he was already a kind of day pupil at an
  institution: an undersized, weak child with a stomach so delicate that
  the slightest deviation from a strict regime fixed for him by the doctor
  would throw him into convulsions. "Alcohol would kill him like
  strychnine," the doctor said. "And he will never be a man, properly
  speaking. With care, he will live some time longer. But he will never be
  any older than he is now." He was talking to the woman who had found
  Popeye in her car that day when his grandmother burned the house down and
  at whose instigation Pop-
   174        WILLIAM FAULKNER

 eye was under the doctor's care. She would fetch him to her home in
 afternoons and for holidays, where he would play by himself. She decided
 to have a children's party for him. She told him about it, bought him a
 new suit. When the afternoon of the party came and the guests began to
 arrive, Popeye could not be found. Finally a servant found a bathroom door
 locked. They called the child, but got no answer. They sent for a lock-
 smith, but in the meantime the woman, frightened, had the door broken in
 with an axe. The bathroom was empty. The window was open. It gave onto a
 lower roof from which a drainpipe descended to the ground. But Popeye was
 gone. On the floor lay a wicker cage in which two lovebirds lived; beside
 it lay the birds themselves, and the bloody scissors with which he had cut
 them up alive. Three months later, at the instigation of a neighbor of his
 mother, Popeye was arrested and sent to a home for incorrigible children.
 He had cut up a half-grown kitten the same way.
  His mother was an invalid. The woman who had tried to befriend the child
  supported her, letting her do needlework and such. After Popeye was
  out-he was let out after five years, his behavior having been impeccable,
  as being curedhe would write to her two or three times a year, from
  Mobile and then New Orleans and then Memphis. Each summer he would return
  home to see her, prosperous, quiet, thin, black, and uncommunicative in
  his narrow black suits. He told her that his business was being night
  clerk in hotels; that following his profession, he would move from town
  to town, as a doctor or a lawyer might.
  While he was on his way home that summer they arrested him for killing
  a man in one town and at an hour when he was in another town killing
  somebody else-that man who made money and had nothing he could do with
  it, spend it for, since he knew that alcohol would kill him like poison,
  who had no friends and had never known a woman and knew he could
  never-and he said. "For Christ's sake," looking about the cell in the
  jail of the town where the policeman had been killed, his free hand (the
  other was handcuffed to the officer who had brought him from Birmingham)
  finicking a cigarette from his coat.
  "Let him send for his lawyer," they said, "and get that off his chest.
  You want to wire?"
  "Nah," he said, his cold, soft eyes touching briefly the cot, the high
  small window, the grated door through which the light fell. They removed
  the handcuff; Popeye's hand appeared to flick a small flame out of thin
  air. He lit the cigarette and snapped the match toward the door. "What
  do I want with a lawyer? I never was in- What's the name of this dump?"
            SANCTUARY           175
 They told him. "You forgot, have you?"
 "He won't forget it no more," another said.
  "Except he'll remember his lawyer's name by morning," the first said.
  They left him smoking on the cot. He heard doors clash. Now and then he
  heard voices from the other cells; somewhere down the corridor a negro was
  singing. Popeye lay on the cot, his feet crossed in small, gleaming black
  shoes. "For Christ's sake," he said.
 The next morning the judge asked him if he wanted a lawyer.
  "What for?" he said. "I told them last night I never was here before in my
  life. I dont like your town well enough to bring a stranger here for
  nothing."
 The judge and the bailiff conferred aside.
 "You'd better get your lawyer," the judge said.
  "All right," Popeye said. He turned and spoke generally into the room: "Any
  of you ginneys want a one-day job?"
  The judge rapped on the table. Popeye turned back, his tight shoulders
  lifted in a faint shrug, his hand moving toward the pocket where he carried
  his cigarettes. The judge appointed him counsel, a young man just out of
  law school.
  "And I wont bother about being sprung," Popeye said. "Get it over with all
  at once."
  "You wouldn't get any bail from me, anyway," the judge told him.
  "Yeuh?" Popeye said. "All right, Jack," he told his lawyer, 41get going.
  I'm due in Pensacola right now."
 "Take the prisoner back to jail," the judge said.
  His lawyer had an ugly, eager, earnest face. He rattled on with a kind of
  gaunt enthusiasm while Popeye lay on the cot, smoking, his hat over his
  eye, motionless as a basking snake save for the periodical movement of the
  hand that held the cigarette. At last he said: "Here. I aint the judge.
  Tell him all this."
 "But I've got-"
  "Sure. Tell it to them. I dont know nothing about it. I wasn't even there.
  Get out and walk it off."
  The trial lasted one day. While a fellow policeman, a cigarclerk, a
  telephone girl testified, while his own lawyer rebutted in a gaunt mixture
  of uncouth enthusiasm and earnest illjudgment, Popeye lounged in his chair,
  looking out the window above the jury's heads. Now and then he yawned; his
  hand moved to the pocket where his cigarettes lay, then refrained and
  rested idle against the black cloth of his suit, in the waxy lifelessness
  of shape and size like the hand of a doll.
  The jury was out eight minutes. They stood and looked at him and said he
  was guilty. Motionless, his position unchanged
 176        WILLIAM FAULKNER
 he looked back at them in a slow silence for several moments. "Well, for
 Christ's sake," he said. The judge rapped sharply with his gavel; the
 officer touched his arm.
  "I'll appeal," the lawyer babbled, plunging along beside him. "I'll fight
  them through every court-"
  .. Sure," Popeye said, lying on the cot and lighting a cigarette; "but not
  in here. Beat it, now. Go take a pill."
  ne District Attorney was already making his plans for the appeal. "It was
  too easy," he said. "He took it- Did you see how he took it? like he might
  be listening to a song he was too lazy to either like or dislike, and the
  Court telling on what day they were going to break his neck. Probably got
  a Memphis lawyer already there outside the supreme court door now, waiting
  for a wire. I know them. It's them thugs like that have made justice a
  laughing-stock, until even when we get a conviction, everybody knows it
  wont hold."
  Popeye sent for the turnkey and gave him a hundred dollar bill. He wanted
  a shaving-kit and cigarettes. "Keep the change and let me know when it's
  smoked up," he said.
  "I reckon you wont be smoking with me much longer," the turnkey said.
  "You'll get a good lawyer, this time."
  " Dont forget that lotion," Popeye said. "Ed Pinaud." He called it
  "Py-nawd."
  It had been a gray summer, a little cool. Little daylight ever reached the
  cell, and a light burned in the corridor all the time, falling into the
  cell in a broad pale mosaic, reaching the cot where his feet lay. The
  turnkey gave him a chair. He used it for a table; upon it the dollar watch
  lay, and a carton of cigarettes and a cracked soup bowl of stubs, and he
  lay on the cot, smoking and contemplating his feet while day after day
  passed. The gleam of his shoes grew duller, and his clothes needed
  pressing, because he lay in them all the time, since it was cool in the
  stone cell.
  One day the turnkey said: "There's folks here says that deppity invited
  killing. He done two-three mean things folks know about." Popeye smoked,
  his hat over his face. The turnkey said: "They might not sent your
  telegram. You want me to send another one for you?" Leaning against the
  grating he could see Popeye's feet, his thin, black legs motionless, merg-
  ing into the delicate bulk of his prone body and the hat slanted across his
  averted face, the cigarette in one small hand. His feet were in shadow, in
  the shadow of the turnkey's body where it blotted out the grating. After a
  while the turnkey went away quietly. When he had six days left the turnkey
  offered to bring him magazines, a deck of cards.
  "What for?" Popeye said. For the first time he looked at the turnkey, his
  head lifted, in his smooth, pallid face his eyes
            SANCTUARY            177
 round and soft as those prehensile tips on a child's toy arrows. Then he
 lay back again. After that each morning the turnkey thrust a rolled
 newspaper through the door. They fell to the floor and lay there,
 accumulating, unrolling and flattening slowly of their own weight in
 diurnal progression.
  When he had three days left a Memphis lawyer arrived. Unbidden, he rushed
  up to the cell. All that morning the turnkey heard his voice in pleading
  and anger and expostulation; by noon he was hoarse, his voice not much
  louder than a whisper. "Are you just going to lie here and let-"
  "I'm all right," Popeye said. "I didn't send for you. Keep Your nose
  out."
  "Do you want to hang? Is that it? Are you trying to commit suicide? Are
  you so tired of dragging down jack that . . . You, the smartest-"
 "I told you once. I've got enough on you."
  "You, to have it hung on you by a small-time j.p.! When I go back to
  Memphis and tell them, they wont believe it."
  "Dont tell them, then." He lay for a time while the lawyer looked at him
  in baffled and raging unbelief. "Them durn hicks," Popeye said. "Jesus
  Christ ... Beat it, now," he said. "I told you. I'm all right."
  On the night before, a minister came in. "Will you let me pray with you?"
  he said. "Sure," Popeye said: "go ahead. Don't mind me."
  The minister knelt beside the cot where Popeye lay smoking. After a while
  the minister heard him rise and cross the floor, then return to the cot.
  When he rose Popeye was lying on the cot, smoking. The minister looked
  behind him, where he had hear Popeye moving and saw twelve marks at
  spaced intervals along the base of the wall, as though marked there with
  burned matches. Two of the spaces were filled with cigarette stubs laid
  in neat rows. In the third space were two stubs. Before he departed he
  watched Popeye rise and go there and crush out two more stubs and lay
  them carefully beside the others.
  Just after five o'clock the minister returned. All the spaces were filled
  save the twelfth one. It was three quarters complete. Popeye was lying
  on the cot. "Ready to go?" he said.
 "Not yet," the minister said. "Try to pray," he said. "Try.
  "Sure," Popeye said; "go ahead." The minister knelt again. He heard
  Popeye rise once and cross the floor and then return.
  At five-thirty the turnkey came. "I brought-" he said. He held his closed
  fist dumbly through the grating. "Here's your change from that hundred
  you never- I brought . . . It's forty-eight dollars. Wait; I'll count it
  again; I dont know exactly, but I can give you a list-them tickets . .
  ."
 "Keep it," Popeye said. "Buy yourself a hoop."
 178        WILLIAM FAULKNER

  They came for him at six. The minister went with him, his hand under
  Poveye's elbow, and he stood beneath the scaffold pravinQ, while they
  adiusted the rope, draggine it over Popeye's sleek oiled head, breaking
  his hair loose. His hands were tied, so he began to jerk his head,
  flipping his hair back each time it fell forward again, while the
  minister prayed, the others motionless at their posts with bowed heads.
  Popeye began to jerk his neck forward in little jerks. "Psssst!" he said,
  the sound cutting sharp into the drone of the minister's voice;
  "nssssst!" The sheriff looked at him; he quit jerking his neck and stood
  ri-id as thouah he had an egg balqnced on his head. "Fix my hair, Jack,"
  he said. "Sure," the sheriff said. "I'll fix it for you"; springing the
  trap.
  It had been a gray (Jay, a grav summer, a gray year. On the street men
  wore overcoats and in the Luxembourg Gardens as Temole and her father
  passed the women sat knitting in shawls and even the men playinQ croauet
  played in coats and capes, and in the sad gloom of the chestnut trees the
  dry click of balls, the random shouts of children, had that quality of
  autumn, gallant and evanescent and forlorn. From beyond the circle with
  its spurious Greek balustrade, clotted with movement, filled with a gray
  light of the same color and texture as the water which the fountain
  played into the pool, came a steady crash of music. They went on, passed
  the pool where the children and an old man in a shabby brown overcoat
  sailed toy boats, and entered the trees again and found seats. Im-
  mediately an old woman came with decrepit promptitude and collected four
  sous.
  In the pavilion a band in the horizon blue of the army played Massenet
  and Scriabine, and Berlioz like a thin coating of tortured Tschaikovsky
  on a slice of stale bread, while the twilight dissolved in wet gleams
  from the branches, onto the pavilion and the sombre toadstools of
  umbrellas. Rich and resonant the brasses crashed and died in the thick
  green twilight, rolling over them in rich sad waves. Temple yawned behind
  her hand, then she took out a compact and opened it upon a face in
  miniature sullen and discontented and sad. Beside her her father sat, his
  hands crossed on the head of his stick, the rigid bar of his moustache
  beaded with moisture like frosted silver. She closed the compact and from
  beneath her smart new hat she seemed to follow with her eyes the waves
  of music, to dissolve into the dying brasses, across the pool and the
  opposite semicircle of trees where at sombre intervals the dead tranquil
  queens in stained marble mused, and on into the sky lying prone and
  vanquished in the embrace of the season of rain and death.