Absalom, Absalom! (Chapter VIII)

There would be no deep-breathing tonight. The window would remain closed above the frozen and empty quad beyond which the windows in the opposite wall were, with two or three exceptions, already dark; soon the chimes would ring for midnight, the notes melodious and tranquil, faint and clear as glass in the fierce (it had quit snowing) still air. “So the old man sent the nigger for Henry,” Shreve said. “And Henry came in and the old man said ‘They cannot marry because hе is your brother’ and Henry said ‘You lie’ likе that, that quick: no space, no interval, no nothing between like when you press the button and get light in the room. And the old man just sat there, didn’t even move and strike him and so Henry didn’t say ‘You lie’ again because he knew now it was so; he just said ‘It’s not true,’ not ‘I dont believe it’ but ‘It’s not true’ because he could maybe see the old man’s face again now and demon or no it was a kind of grief and pity, not for himself but for Henry, because Henry was just young while he (the old man) knew that he still had the courage and even all the shrewdness too——”

Shreve stood beside the table, facing Quentin again though not seated now. In the overcoat buttoned awry over the bathrobe he looked huge and shapeless like a disheveled bear as he stared at Quentin (the Southerner, whose blood ran quick to cool, more supple to compensate for violent changes of temperature perhaps, perhaps merely nearer the surface) who sat hunched in his chair, his hands thrust into his pockets as if he were trying to hug himself warm between his arms, looking somehow fragile and even wan in the lamplight, the rosy glow which now had nothing of warmth, coziness, in it, while both their breathing vaporized faintly in the cold room where there was now not two of them but four, the two who breathed not individuals now yet something both more and less than twins, the heart and blood of youth. Shreve was nineteen, a few months younger than Quentin. He looked exactly nineteen; he was one of those people whose correct age you never know because they look exactly that and so you tell yourself that he or she cannot possibly be that because he or she looks too exactly that not to take advantage of the appearance: so you never believe implicitly that he or she is either that age which they claim or that which in sheer desperation they agree to or which someone else reports them to be, strong enough and willing enough for two, for two thousand, for all. Not two of then in a New England college sitting-room but one in a Mississippi library sixty years ago, with holly and mistletoe in vases on the mantel or thrust behind, crowning and garlanding with the season and time the pictures on the walls, and a sprig or so decorating the photograph, the group—mother and two children—on the desk, behind which the father sat when the son entered; and they—Quentin and Shreve—thinking how after the father spoke and before what he said stopped being shock and began to make sense, Henry would recall later how he had seen through the window beyond his father’s head the sister and the lover in the garden, pacing slowly, the sister’s head bent with listening, the lover’s head leaned above it while they paced slowly on in that rhythm which not the eyes but the heart marks and calls the beat and measure for, to disappear slowly beyond some bush or shrub starred with white bloom—jasmine, spiraea, honeysuckle, perhaps myriad scentless unpickable Cherokee roses—names, blooms which Shreve possibly had never heard and never seen although the air had blown over him first which became tempered to nourish them. It would not matter here in Cambridge that the time had been winter in that garden too, and hence no bloom nor leaf even if there had been someone to walk there and be seen there since, judged by subsequent events, it had been night in the garden also. But that did not matter because it had been so long ago. It did not matter to them (Quentin and Shreve) anyway, who could without moving, as free now of flesh as the father who decreed and forbade, the son who denied and repudiated, the lover who acquiesced, the beloved who was not bereaved, and with no tedious transition from hearth and garden to saddle, who could be already clattering over the frozen ruts of that December night and that Christmas dawn, that day of peace and cheer, of holly and goodwill and logs on the hearth; not two of them there and then either but four of them riding the two horses through the iron darkness, and that not mattering either: what faces and what names they called themselves and were called by so long as the blood coursed—the blood, the immortal brief recent intransient blood which could hold honor above slothy unregret and love above fat and easy shame.

“And Bon didn’t know it,” Shreve said. “The old man didn’t move and this time Henry didn’t say ‘You lie,’ he said ‘It’s not true’ and the old man said, ‘Ask him. Ask Charles then’ and then Henry knew that that was what his father had meant all the time and that that was what he meant himself when he told his father he lied, because what the old man said wasn’t just ‘He is your brother’ but ‘He has known all the time that he is yours and your sister’s brother.’ But Bon didn’t know. Listen, dont you remember how your father said it, that not one time did he—the old guy, the demon—ever seem to wonder how the other wife managed to find him, track him down, had never once seemed to wonder what she might have been doing all that time, the thirty years since that day when he paid his bill with her and got it receipted, so he thought, and saw with his own eyes that it was (so he thought) destroyed, torn up and thrown to the wind; never once wondered about this but only that she had done it, could have and would have wanted to track him down? So it wasn’t her that told Bon. She wouldn’t have wanted to, maybe for the reason that she knew he—the demon—would believe she had. Or maybe she didn’t get around to telling him. Maybe she just never thought that there could be anyone as close to her as a lone child out of her own body who would have to be told how she had been scorned and suffered. Or maybe she was already telling it before he was big enough to know words and so by the time he was big enough to understand what was being told him she had told it so much and so hard that the words didn’t make sense to her anymore either because they didn’t have to make sense to her, and so she had got to the point where when she thought she was saying it she was quiet, and when she thought she was quiet it was just the hate and the fury and the unsleeping and the unforgetting. Or maybe she didn’t intend for him to know it then. Maybe she was grooming him for that hour and moment which she couldn’t foresee but that she knew would arrive some day because it would have to arrive or else she would have to do like the Aunt Rosa and deny that she had ever breathed—the moment when he (Bon) would stand side by side (not face to face) with his father where fate or luck or justice or whatever she called it could do the rest (and it did, better than she could have invented or hoped or even dreamed, and your father said how being a woman she probably wasn’t even surprised)—grooming him herself, bringing him on by hand herself, washing and feeding and putting him to bed and giving him the candy and the toys and the other child’s fun and diversion and needs in measured doses like medicine with her own hand: not because she had to, who could have hired a dozen or bought a hundred to do it for her with the money, the jack that he (the demon) had voluntarily surrendered, repudiated to balance his moral ledger: but like the millionaire who could have a hundred hostlers and handlers but who has just the one horse, the one maiden, the one moment, the one matching of heart and muscle and will with the one instant: and himself (the millionaire) patient in the overalls and the sweat and the stable muck, and the mother bringing him along to the moment when she would say ‘He is your father. He cast you and me aside and denied you his name. Now go’ and then sit down and let God finish it: pistol or knife or rack; destruction or grief or anguish: God to call the shot or turn the wheel. Jesus, you can almost see him: a little boy already come to learn, to expect, before he could remember having learned his own name or the name of the town where he lived or how to say either of them, that every so often he would be snatched up from playing and held, gripped between the two hands fierce with (what passed at least with him for it) love, against the two fierce rigid knees, the face that he remembered since before remembering began as supervising all the animal joys of palate and stomach and entrails, of warmth and pleasure and security, swooping down at him in a kind of blazing immobility: he taking the interruption as a matter of course, as just another natural phenomenon of existence; the face filled with furious and almost unbearable unforgiving almost like fever (not bitterness and despair: just implacable will for revenge) as just another manifestation of mammalian love—and he not knowing what in hell it was all about. He would be too young to curry any connected fact out of the fury and hate and the tumbling speed; not comprehending or caring: just curious, creating for himself (without help since who to help him) his own notion of that Porto Rico or Haiti or wherever it was he understood vaguely that he had come from, like orthodox children do of Heaven or the cabbage patch or wherever it was that they came from, except that his was different in that you were not supposed (your mother didn’t intend to, anyway) to ever go back there (and maybe when you got as old as she was you would be horrified too, every time you found hidden in your thoughts anything that just smelled or tasted like it might be a wish to go back there). You were not supposed to know when and why you left but only that you had escaped, that whatever power had created the place for you to hate it had likewise got you away from the place so you could hate it good and never forgive it in quiet and monotony (though not exactly in what you would call peace); that you were to thank God you didn’t remember anything about it yet at the same time you were not to, maybe dared not to, ever forget it—he not even knowing maybe that he took it for granted that all kids didn’t have fathers too and that getting snatched every day or so from whatever harmless pursuit in which you were not bothering anybody or even thinking about them, by someone because that someone was bigger than you, stronger than you, and being held for a minute or five minutes under a kind of busted water pipe of incomprehensible fury and fierce yearning and vindictiveness and jealous rage was part of childhood which all mothers of children had received in turn from their mothers and from their mothers in turn from that Porto Rico or Haiti or wherever it was we all came from but none of us ever lived in. So that when he grew up and had children he would have to pass it on too (and maybe deciding then and there that it was too much trouble and bother and that he would not have any children or at least hoped he would not) and hence no man had a father, no one personal Porto Rico or Haiti, but all mother faces which ever bred swooping down at those almost calculable moments out of some obscure ancient general affronting and outraging which the actual living articulate meat had not even suffered but merely inherited; all boy flesh that walked and breathed stemming from that one ambiguous eluded dark fatherhead and so brothered perennial and ubiquitous everywhere under the sun——”

Quentin and Shreve stared at one another—glared rather—their quiet regular breathing vaporizing faintly and steadily in the now tomblike air. There was something curious in the way they looked at one another, curious and quiet and profoundly intent, not at all as two young men might look at each other but almost as a youth and a very young girl might out of virginity itself—a sort of hushed and naked searching, each look burdened with youth’s immemorial obsession not with time’s dragging weight which the old live with but with its fluidity: the bright heels of all the lost moments of fifteen and sixteen. “Then he got older and got out from under the apron despite her (despite him too maybe; maybe the both of them) and he didn’t even care. He found out that she was up to something and he not only didn’t care, he didn’t even care that he didn’t know what it was; he got older and found out that she had been shaping and tempering him to be the instrument for whatever it was her hand was implacable for, maybe came to believe (or saw) that she had tricked him into receiving that shape and temper, and didn’t care about that too because probably by that time he had learned that there were three things and no more: breathing, pleasure, darkness; and without money there could be no pleasure, and without pleasure it would not even be breathing but mere protoplasmic inhale and collapse of blind unorganism in a darkness where light never began. And he had the money because he knew that she knew that the money was the only thing she could coerce and smooth him into the barrier with when Derby Day came, so she didn’t dare pinch him there and she knew he knew it: so that maybe he even blackmailed her, bought her off that way: ‘You give me the jack as I want it and I wont ask why or what for yet.’ Or maybe she was so busy grooming him that she never thought of the money now, who probably never had had much time to remember it or count it or wonder how much there was in the intervals of the hating and the being mad, and so all to check him up about the money would be the lawyer. He (Bon) probably learned that the first thing: that he could go to his mother and hold the lawyer’s feet to the fire anytime, like the millionaire horse has only to come in one time with a little extra sweat on him, and tomorrow he will have a new jock. Sure, that’s who it would be: the lawyer, that lawyer with his private mad female millionaire to farm, who probably wasn’t interested enough in the money to see whether the checks had any other writing on them when she signed them—that lawyer who, with Bon’s mother already plotting and planning him since before he could remember for that day when he should be translated quick into so much rich and rotting dirt, had already been plowing and planting and harvesting him and the mother both as if he already was—that lawyer who maybe had the secret drawer in the secret safe and the secret paper in it, maybe a chart with colored pins stuck into it like generals have in campaigns, and all the notations in code: Today Sutpen finished robbing a drunken Indian of a hundred miles of virgin land, val. $25,000. At 2:31 today came up out of swamp with final plank for house, val. in conj. with land 40,000. 7:52 p.m. today married. Bigamy threat val. minus nil. unless quick buyer. Not probable. Doubtless conjoined with wife same day. Say 1 year and then with maybe the date and the hour too: Son. Intrinsic val. possible though not probable forced sale of house & land plus val. crop minus child’s one quarter. Emotional val. plus 100% times nil. plus val. crop. Say 10 years, one or more children. Intrinsic val. forced sale house & improved land plus liquid assets minus children’s share. Emotional val. 100% times increase yearly for each child plus intrinsic val. plus liquid assets plus working acquired credit and maybe here with the date too: Daughter and you could maybe even have seen the question mark after it and the other words even: daughter? daughter? daughter? trailing off not because thinking trailed off, but on the contrary thinking stopping right still then, backing up a little and spreading like when you lay a stick across a trickle of water, spreading and rising slow all around him in whatever place it was that he could lock the door to and sit quiet and subtract the money that Bon was spending on his whores and his champagne from what his mother had, and figure up how much would be left of it tomorrow and next month and next year or until Sutpen would be good and ripe—thinking about the good hard cash that Bon was throwing away on his horses and clothes and the champagne and gambling and women (he would have known about the octoroon and the left-handed marriage long before the mother did even if it had been any secret; maybe he even had a spy in the bedroom like he seems to have had in Sutpen’s; maybe he even planted her, said to himself like you do about a dog: He is beginning to ramble. He needs a block. Not a tether: just a light block of some sort, so he cant get inside of anything that might have a fence around it) and only him to try to check it, or as much as he dared, and not getting far because he knew too that all Bon had to do was to go to his mother and the race horse would have a gold eating trough if he wanted it and, if the jock wasn’t careful, a new jockey too—counting up the money, figuring what he would net at this normal rate over the next few years, and meanwhile crucified between his two problems: whether maybe what he ought to do was to wash his hands of the Sutpen angle and clean up what was left and light out for Texas. Except that whenever he thought about doing that he would have to think about all the money that Bon had already spent, and that if he had only gone to Texas ten years ago or five years ago or even last year he would have made more: so that maybe at night while he would be waiting for the window to begin to turn gray he would be like what Aunt Rosa said she was and he would have to deny that he breathed (or maybe wished he didn’t) except for that two hundred percent. times the intrinsic value every New Year’s—the water backing up from the stick and rising and spreading about him steady and quiet as light and him sitting there in the actual white glare of clairvoyance (or second sight or faith in human misfortune and folly or whatever you want to call it) that was showing him not only what might happen but what was actually going to happen and him declining to believe it was going to happen, not because it had come to him as a vision, but because it would have to have love and honor and courage and pride in it; and believing it might happen, not because it was logical and possible, but because it would be the most unfortunate thing for all concerned that could occur; and though you could no more have proved vice or virtue or courage or cowardice to him without showing him the moving people than you could have proved death to him without showing him a corpse, he did believe in misfortune because of that rigorous and arduous dusty eunuch’s training which taught to leave man’s good luck and joys to God, who would in return surrender all his miseries and follies and misfortunes to the lice and fleas of Coke and Littleton. And the old Sabine——”

They stared—glared—at one another. It was Shreve speaking, though save for the slight difference which the intervening degrees of latitude had inculcated in them (differences not in tone or pitch but of turns of phrase and usage of words), it might have been either of them and was in a sense both: both thinking as one, the voice which happened to be speaking the thought only the thinking become audible, vocal; the two of them creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere, who, shadows, were shadows not of flesh and blood which had lived and died but shadows in turn of what were (to one of them at least, to Shreve) shades too, quiet as the visible murmur of their vaporizing breath. The chimes now began to ring for midnight, melodious, slow and faint beyond the closed, the snow-sealed, window. “——the old Sabine, who couldn’t to save her life have told you or the lawyer or Bon or anybody else probably what she wanted, expected, hoped for because she was a woman and didn’t need to want or hope or expect anything, but just to want and expect and hope (and besides, your father said that when you have plenty of good strong hating you dont need hope because the hating will be enough to nourish you)—the old Sabine (not so old yet, but she would have just let herself go in the sense that you keep the engines clean and oiled and the best of coal in the bunkers but you dont bother to shine the brightwork or holystone the decks anymore; just let herself go on the outside. Not fat; she would burn it up too fast for that, shrivel it away in the gullet between swallowing and stomach; no pleasure in the chewing; having to chew just another nuisance like no pleasure in the clothing; having the old wear out and having to choose the new just another nuisance: and no pleasure in the fine figure he——” neither of them said ‘Bon’ “——cut in the fine pants that fit his leg and the fine coats that fit his shoulders nor in the fact that he had more watches and cuff buttons and finer linen and horses and yellow-wheeled buggies (not to mention the gals) than most others did, but all that too just an unavoidable nuisance that he would have to get shut of before he could do her any good just like he had to get shut of the teething and the chicken pox and the light boy’s bones in order to be able to do her any good)—the old Sabine getting the faked reports from the lawyer like reports sent back to headquarters from a battle front, with maybe a special nigger in the lawyer’s anteroom to do nothing else but carry them and that maybe once in two years or five times in two days, depending on when she would begin to itch for news and began to worry him—the report, the communique about how we are not far behind him (Sutpen) in Texas or Missouri or maybe California (California would be fine, that far away; convenient, proof inherent in the sheer distance, the necessity to accept and believe) and we are going to catch up with him any day now and so do not worry. So she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t worry at all: she would just have out the carriage and go to the lawyer, busting in in the black dress that looked like a section of limp stove pipe and maybe not even a hat but just a shawl over her head, so that the only things missing would be the mop and the pail—busting in and saying ‘He’s dead. I know he is dead and how can he, how can he be,’ not meaning what the Aunt Rosa meant: where did they find or invent a bullet that could kill him but How can he be allowed to die without having to admit that he was wrong and suffer and regret it. And so in the next two seconds they would almost catch him (he—the lawyer—would show her the actual letter, the writing in the English she couldn’t read, that had just come in, that he had just sent for the nigger to carry to her when she came in, and the lawyer done practiced putting the necessary date on the letter until he could do it now while his back would be toward her, in the two seconds it would take him to get the letter out of the file)—catch him, get so close to him as to have ample satisfaction that he was alive; so close indeed that he would be able to get her out of the office before she had sat down and into the carriage again and on the way home again where, among the Florentine mirrors and Paris drapes and tufted camisoles, she would still look like the one that had come in to scrub the floors, in the black dress that the cook wouldn’t have looked at even when it was new five or six years ago, holding, clutching the letter she couldn’t read (maybe the only word in it she could even recognize would be the word ‘Sutpen’) in one hand and brushing back a rope of lank iron-colored hair with the other and not looking at the letter like she was reading it even if she could have, but swooping at it, blazing down at it as if she knew she would have only a second to read it in, only a second for it to remain intact in after her eyes would touch it, before it took fire and so would not be perused but consumed, leaving her sitting there with a black crumbling blank carbon ash in her hand.

“And him——” (Neither of them said ‘Bon’) “——there watching her, who had got old enough to have learned that what he thought was childhood wasn’t childhood, that other children had been made by fathers and mothers where he had been created new when he began to remember, new again when he came to the point where his carcass quit being a baby and became a boy, new again when he quit being a boy and became a man; created between a lawyer and a woman whom he had thought was feeding and washing and putting him to bed and finding him in the extra ticklings for his palate and his pleasure because he was himself, until he got big enough to find out that it wasn’t him at all she was washing and feeding the candy and the fun to but it was a man that hadn’t even arrived yet, whom even she had never seen yet, who would be something else beside that boy when he did arrive like the dynamite which destroys the house and the family and maybe even the whole community aint the old peaceful paper that maybe would rather be blowing aimless and light along the wind or the old merry sawdust or the old quiet chemicals that had rather be still and dark in the quiet earth like they had been before the meddling guy with ten-power spectacles came and dug them up and strained, warped and kneaded them—created between this woman and a hired lawyer (the woman who since before he could remember he now realized had been planning and grooming him for some moment that would come and pass and following which he saw that to her he would be little more than so much rich rotting dirt; the lawyer who since before he could remember he now realized had been plowing and planting and watering and manuring and harvesting him as if he already was) and Bon watching her, lounging there against the mantel maybe in the fine clothes, in the harem incense odor of what you might call easy sanctity, watching her looking at the letter, not even thinking I am looking upon my mother naked since if the hating was nakedness, she had worn it long enough now for it to do the office of clothing like they say that modesty can do, does——

“So he went away. He went away to school at the age of twenty-eight. And he wouldn’t know nor care about that either: which of them—mother or lawyer—it was who decided he should go to school nor why, because he had known all the time that his mother was up to something and that the lawyer was up to something, and he didn’t care enough about what either of them was to try to find out, who knew that the lawyer knew that his mother was up to something but that his mother didn’t know that the lawyer was up to something, and that it would be all right with the lawyer if his mother got whatever it was she wanted, provided he (the lawyer) got what he wanted one second before or at least at the same time. He went away to school; he said ‘All right’ and told the octoroon goodbye and went to school, who not in all the twenty-eight years had ever been told by anyone, ‘Do as these others do; have this task done at nine a.m. tomorrow or Friday or Monday’; maybe it was even the octoroon whom they (or the lawyer) used—the light block (not tether) which the lawyer had put on him to keep him from getting inside of something which might be found to have a fence around it later. Maybe the mother found out about the octoroon and the child and the ceremony and discovered more than the lawyer had (or would believe, who considered Bon only dull, not a fool) and sent for him and he came and lounged against the mantel again and maybe knowing what was up, what had happened before she told him, lounging there with an expression on his face you might call smiling except it was not that but just something you couldn’t see through or past, and she watching him with maybe the lank iron-colored strand of hair down again and not even bothering to brush it back now because she was not looking at any letter now but her eyes blazing at him, her voice trying to blaze at him out of the urgency of alarm and fear, but she managing to keep it down since she could not talk about betrayal because she had not told him yet, and now, at this moment, she would not dare risk it—he looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn’t smiling but was just something you were not supposed to see beyond, saying, admitting it: ‘Why not? All young men do it. The ceremony too. I didn’t set out to get the child, but now that I have. . . . It’s not a bad child, either’ and she watching him, glaring at him and not being able to say what she would because she had put off too long now saying what she could: ‘But you. This is different’ and he (she would not need to say it. He would know because he already knew why she had sent for him, even if he did not know and did not care what she had been up to since before he could remember, since before he could take a woman whether in love or not): ‘Why not? Men seem to have to marry some day, sooner or later. And this is one whom I know, who makes me no trouble. And with the ceremony, that bother, already done. And as for a little matter like a spot of negro blood——” not needing to talk much, say much either, not needing to say I seem to have been born into this world with so few fathers that I have too many brothers to outrage and shame while alive and hence too many descendants to bequeath my little portion of hurt and harm to, dead; not that, just ‘a little spot of negro blood——’ and then to watch the face, the desperate urgency and fear, then to depart, kissing her maybe, her hand maybe which would lie in his and even touch his lips like a dead hand because of the desperate casting for this straw or that; maybe as he went out he said she will go to him (the lawyer); if I were to wait five minutes I could see her in the shawl. So probably by tonight I will be able to know—if I cared to know. Maybe by night he did, maybe before that if they managed to find him, get word to him, because she went to the lawyer. And it was right in the lawyer’s alley. Maybe before she even got started telling it good that gentle white glow began like when you turn up a wick; maybe he could even almost see his hand writing on into the space where the daughter? daughter? daughter? never had quite showed. Because maybe that had been the lawyer’s trouble and worry and concern all the time; that ever since she had made him promise he would never tell Bon who his father was, he had been waiting and wondering how to do it, since maybe he knew that if he were to tell Bon, Bon might believe it or he might not, but certainly he would go and tell his mother that the lawyer had told him and then he (the lawyer) would be sunk, not for any harm done because there would be no harm, since this could not alter the situation, but for having crossed his paranoiac client. Maybe while he would sit in his office adding and subtracting the money and adding what they would get out of Sutpen (he was never worried about what Bon would do when he found out; he had probably a long time ago paid Bon that compliment of thinking that even if he was too dull or too indolent to suspect or find out about his father himself, he wasn’t fool enough not to be able to take advantage of it once somebody showed him the proper move; maybe if the thought had ever occurred to him that because of love or honor or anything else under Heaven or jurisprudence either, Bon would not, would refuse to, he (the lawyer) would even have furnished proof that he no longer breathed)—maybe all the time it was this that racked him: how to get Bon where he would either have to find it out himself, or where somebody—the father or the mother—would have to tell him. So maybe she wasn’t out of the office good—or at least as soon as he had had time to open the safe and look in the secret drawer and make sure that it was the University of Mississippi that Henry attended—before his hand was writing steady and even into the space where the daughter? daughter? daughter? never had showed—and with the date here too: 1859. Two children. Say 1860, 20 years. Increase 200% times intrinsic val. yearly plus liquid assets plus credit earned. Approx’te val. 1860, 100,000. Query: bigamy threat, Yes or No. Possible No. Incest threat: Credible Yes and the hand going back before it put down the period, lining out the Credible, writing in Certain, underlining it.

“And he didn’t care about that too; he just said, ‘All right.’ Because maybe he knew now that his mother didn’t know and never would know what she wanted, and so he couldn’t beat her (maybe he had learned from the octoroon that you cant beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you dont even try to), and he knew that all the lawyer wanted was just the money; and so if he just didn’t make the mistake of believing that he could beat all of it, if he just remembered to be quiet and be alert he could beat some of it.—So he said, ‘All right’ and let his mother pack the fine clothes and the fine linen into the bags and trunks, and maybe he lounged into the lawyer’s office and watched from behind that something which could have been called smiling while the lawyer made the elbow motion about getting his horses onto the steamboat and maybe buying him an extra special body servant and arranging about the money and all; watching from behind the smiling while the lawyer did the heavy father even, talking about the scholarship, the culture, the Latin and the Greek that would equip and polish him for the position which he would hold in life and how a man to be sure could get that anywhere, in his own library even, who had the will; but how there was something, some quality to culture which only the monastic, the cloistral monotony of a—say obscure and small (though high class, high class) college—and he——” (neither of them said ‘Bon.’ Never at any time did there seem to be any confusion between them as to whom Shreve meant by ‘he’) “——listening courteous and quiet behind that expression which you were not supposed to see past, asking at last, interrupting maybe, courteous and affable—nothing of irony, nothing of sarcasm—‘What did you say this college was?’: and now a good deal of elbow motion here while the lawyer would shuffle through the papers to find the one from which he could read that name which he had been memorizing ever since he first talked to the mother: ‘The University of Mississippi, at’—Where did you say?”

“Oxford,” Quentin said. “It’s about forty miles from——”

“——‘Oxford.’ And then the papers could be still again because he would be talking: about a small college only ten years old, about how there wouldn’t be anything to distract him from his studies there (where, in a sense, wisdom herself would be a virgin or at least not very second hand) and how he would have a chance to observe another and a provincial section of the country in which his high destiny was rooted; (granted the outcome of this war which was without doubt imminent, the successful conclusion of which we all hoped for, had no doubt of) as the man he would be and the economic power he would represent when his mother passed on, and he listening behind that expression, saying, ‘Then you dont recommend the law as a vocation?’ and now for just a moment the lawyer would stop, but not long; maybe not long enough or perceptible enough for you to call it pause: and he would be looking at Bon too: ‘It hadn’t occurred to me that the law might appeal to you’ and Bon: ‘Neither did practising with a rapier appeal to me while I was doing it. But I can recall at least one occasion in my life when I was glad I had’ and then the lawyer, smooth and easy: ‘Then by all means let it be the law. Your mother will ag—be pleased.’ ‘All right,’ he said, not ‘goodbye’; he didn’t care. Maybe he didn’t even say goodbye to the octoroon, to those tears and lamentations and maybe even the clinging, the soft despairing magnolia-colored arms about his knees, and (say) three and a half feet above those boneless steel gyves that expression of his which was not smiling but just something not to be seen through. Because you cant beat them: you just flee (and thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked and racked like ninepins; thanks to whatever Gods for that masculine hipless tapering peg which fits light and glib to move where the cartridge-chambered hips of women hold them fast)—not goodbye: all right: and one night he walked up the gangplank between the torches and probably only the lawyer there to see him off and this not for godspeed but to make sure that he actually took the boat. And the new extra nigger opening the bags in the stateroom, spreading the fine clothes, and the ladies already gathered in the saloon for supper and the men in the bar, preparing for it, but not he; he alone, at the rail, with a cigar maybe, watching the city drift and wink and glitter and sink away and then all motion cease, the boat suspended immobile and without progress from the stars themselves by the two ropes of spark-filled smoke streaming upward from the stacks. And who knows what thinking, what sober weighing and discarding, who had known for years that his mother was up to something; that the lawyer was up to something and though he knew that was just money, yet he knew that within his (the lawyer’s) known masculine limitations he (the lawyer) could be almost as dangerous as the unknown quantity which was his mother; and now this—school, college—and he twenty-eight years old. And not only that, but this particular college, which he had never heard of, which ten years ago did not even exist; and knowing too that it was the lawyer who had chosen it for him—what sober, what intent, what almost frowning Why? Why? Why this college, this particular one above all others?—maybe leaning there in that solitude between panting smoke and engines and almost touching the answer, aware of the jigsaw puzzle picture integers of it waiting, almost lurking, just beyond his reach, inextricable, jumbled, and unrecognizable yet on the point of falling into pattern which would reveal to him at once, like a flash of light, the meaning of his whole life, past—the Haiti, the childhood, the lawyer, the woman who was his mother. And maybe the letter itself right there under his feet, somewhere in the darkness beneath the deck on which he stood—the letter addressed not to Thomas Sutpen at Sutpen’s Hundred but to Henry Sutpen, Esquire, in Residence at the University of Mississippi, near Oxford, Mississippi. One day Henry showed it to him and there was no gentle spreading glow but a flash, a glare (showed it to him who not only had no visible father but had found himself to be, even in infancy, enclosed by an unsleeping cabal bent apparently on teaching him that he had never had a father, that his mother had emerged from a sojourn in limbo, from that state of blessed amnesia in which the weak senses can take refuge from the godless dark forces and powers which weak human flesh cannot stand, to wake pregnant, shrieking and screaming and thrashing, not against the ruthless agony of labor but in protest against the outrage of her swelling loins; that he had been fathered on her not through that natural process but had been blotted onto and out of her body by the old infernal immortal male principle of all unbridled terror and darkness) a glare in which he stood looking at the innocent face of the youth almost ten years his junior, while one part of him said He has my brow my skull my jaw my hands and the other said Wait. Wait. You cant know yet. You cannot know yet whether what you see is what you are looking at or what you are believing. Wait. Wait.

“The letter which he—” it was not Bon Shreve meant now, yet again Quentin seemed to comprehend without difficulty or effort whom he meant “—wrote maybe as soon as he finished that last entry in the record, into the daughter? daughter? daughter? while he thought By all means he must not know now, must not be told before he can get there and he and the daughter—not remembering anything about young love from his own youth and would not have believed it if he had, yet willing to use that too as he would have used courage and pride, thinking not of any hushed wild importunate blood and light hands hungry for touching, but of the fact that this Oxford and this Sutpen’s Hundred were only a day’s ride apart and Henry already established in the University and so maybe for once in his life the lawyer even believed in God: My Dear Mr Sutpen: The undersigned name will not be known to you, nor are the writer’s position and circumstances, for all their reflected worth and (I hope) value, so unobscure as to warrant the hope that he will ever see you in person or you he—worth reflected from and value rendered to two persons of birth and position, one of whom, a lady and widowed mother, resides in that seclusion befitting her condition in the city from which this letter is inscribed, the other of whom, a young gentleman her son, will either be as you read this, or will shortly thereafter be a petitioner before the same Bar of knowledge and wisdom as yourself. It is in his behalf that I write. No: I will not say behalf; certainly I shall not let his lady mother nor the young gentleman himself suspect that I used that term, even to one, Sir, scion of the principal family of that county as it is your fortunate lot to be. Indeed, it were better for me if I had not written at all. But I do; I have; it is irrevocable now; if you discern aught in this letter which smacks of humility, take it as coming not from the mother and certainly not from the son, but from the pen of one whose humble position as legal adviser and man of business to the above described lady and young gentleman, whose loyalty and gratitude toward one whose generosity has found him (I do not confess this; I proclaim it) in bread and meat and fire and shelter over a period long enough to have taught him gratitude and loyalty even if he had not known them, has led him into an action whose means fall behind its intention for the reason that he is only what he is and professes himself to be, not what he would. So take this, Sir, neither as the unwarranted insolence which an unsolicited communication from myself to you would be, not as a plea for sufferance on behalf of an unknown, but as an introduction (clumsy though it be) to one young gentleman whose position needs neither detailing nor recapitulation in the place where this letter is read, of another young gentleman whose position requires neither detailing nor recapitulation in the place where it was written.—Not goodbye; all right; who had had so many fathers as to have neither love nor pride to receive or inflict, neither honor nor shame to share or bequeath; to whom one place was the same as another, like to a cat—cosmopolitan New Orleans or bucolic Mississippi: his own inherited and heritable Florentine lamps and gilded toilet seats and tufted mirrors, or a little jerkwater college not ten years old; champagne in the octoroon’s boudoir or whiskey on a harsh new table in a monk’s cell and a country youth, a bucolic heir apparent who had probably never spent a dozen nights outside of his paternal house (unless perhaps to lie fully dressed beside a fire in the woods listening to dogs running) until he came to school, whom he watched aping his clothing carriage speech and all and (the youth) completely unaware that he was doing it, who (the youth) over the bottle one night said, blurted—no, not blurted: it would be fumbling, groping: and he (the cosmopolite ten years the youth’s senior almost, lounging in one of the silk robes the like of which the youth had never seen before and believed that only women wore) watching the youth blush fiery red yet still face him, still look him straight in the eye while he fumbled, groped, blurted with abrupt complete irrelevance: ‘If I had a brother, I wouldn’t want him to be a younger brother’ and he: ‘Ah?’ and the youth: ‘No. I would want him to be older than me’ and he: ‘No son of a landed father wants an older brother’ and the youth: ‘Yes. I do’, looking straight at the other, the esoteric, the sybarite, standing (the youth) now, erect, thin (because he was young), his face scarlet but his head high and his eyes steady: ‘Yes. And I would want him to be just like you’ and he: ‘Is that so? The whiskey’s your side. Drink or pass.’

“And now,” Shreve said, “we’re going to talk about love.” But he didn’t need to say that either, any more than he had needed to specify which he meant by he, since neither of them had been thinking about anything else; all that had gone before just so much that had to be overpassed and none else present to overpass it but them, as someone always has to rake the leaves up before you can have the bonfire. That was why it did not matter to either of them which one did the talking, since it was not the talking alone which did it, performed and accomplished the overpassing, but some happy marriage of speaking and hearing wherein each before the demand, the requirement, forgave condoned and forgot the faulting of the other—faultings both in the creating of this shade whom they discussed (rather, existed in) and in the hearing and sifting and discarding the false and conserving what seemed true, or fit the preconceived—in order to overpass to love, where there might be paradox and inconsistency but nothing fault nor false. “And now, love. He must have known all about her before he ever saw her—what she looked like, her private hours in that provincial women’s world that even men of the family were not supposed to know a great deal about; he must have learned it without even having to ask a single question. Jesus, it must have kind of boiled out all over him. There must have been nights and nights while Henry was learning from him how to lounge about a bedroom in a gown and slippers such as women wore, in a faint though unmistakable effluvium of scent such as women used, smoking a cigar almost as a woman might smoke it, yet withal such an air of indolent and lethal assurance that only the most reckless man would have gratuitously drawn the comparison (and with no attempt to teach, train, play the mentor on his part—and then maybe yes; maybe who could know what times he looked at Henry’s face and thought, not there but for the intervening leaven of that blood which we do not have in common is my skull, my brow, sockets, shape and angle of jaw and chin and some of my thinking behind it, and which he could see in my face in his turn if he but knew to look as I know but there, just behind a little, obscured a little by that alien blood whose admixing was necessary in order that he exist is the face of the man who shaped us both out of that blind chancy darkness which we call the future; there—there—at any moment, second, I shall penetrate by something of will and intensity and dreadful need, and strip that alien leavening from it and look not on my brother’s face whom I did not know I possessed and hence never missed, but my father’s, out of the shadow of whose absence my spirit’s posthumeity has never escaped—at what moment thinking, watching the eagerness which was without abjectness, the humility which surrendered no pride—the entire proffering of the spirit of which the unconscious aping of clothes and speech and mannerisms was but the shell—thinking what cannot I do with this willing flesh and bone if I wish; this flesh and bone and spirit which stemmed from the same source that mine did, but which sprang in quiet peace and contentment and ran in steady even though monotonous sunlight, where that which he bequeathed me sprang in hatred and outrage and unforgiving and ran in shadow—what could I not mold of this malleable and eager clay which that father himself could not—to what shape of what good there might, must, be in that blood and none handy to take and mold that portion of it in me until too late: or what moments when he might have told himself that it was nonsense, it could not be true; that such coincidences only happened in books, thinking—the weariness, the fatalism, the incorrigible cat for solitude—That young clodhopper bastard. How shall I get rid of him: and then the voice, the other voice: You dont mean that: and he: No. But I do mean the clodhopper bastard) and the days, the afternoons, while they rode together (and Henry aping him here too, who was the better horseman, who maybe had nothing of what Bon would have called style but who had done more of it, to whom a horse was as natural as walking, who would ride anything anywhere and at anything) while he must have watched himself being swamped and submerged in the bright unreal flood of Henry’s speech, translated (the three of them: himself and Henry and the sister whom he had never seen and perhaps did not even have any curiosity to see) into a world like a fairy tale in which nothing else save them existed, riding beside Henry, listening, needing to ask no questions, to prompt to further speech in any manner that youth who did not even suspect that he and the man beside him might be brothers, who each time his breath crossed his vocal chords was saying From now on mine and my sister’s house will be your house and mine and my sister’s lives your life, wondering (Bon)—or maybe not wondering at all—how if conditions were reversed and Henry was the stranger and he (Bon) the scion and still knew what he suspected, if he would say the same; then (Bon) agreeing at last, saying at last, ‘All right. I’ll come home with you for Christmas,’ not to see the third inhabitant of Henry’s fairy tale, not to see the sister because he had not once thought of her: he had merely listened about her: but thinking So at last I shall see him, whom it seems I was bred up never to expect to see, whom I had even learned to live without, thinking maybe how he would walk into the house and see the man who made him and then he would know; there would be that flash, that instant of indisputable recognition between them and he would know for sure and forever—thinking maybe That’s all I want. He need not even acknowledge me; I will let him understand just as quickly that he need not do that, that I do not expect that, will not be hurt by that, just as he will let me know that quickly that I am his son, thinking maybe, maybe again with that expression you might call smiling but which was not, which was just something that even just a clodhopper bastard was not intended to see beyond: I am my mother’s son, at least: I do not seem to know what I want either. Because he knew exactly what he wanted; it was just the saying of it—the physical touch even though in secret, hidden—the living touch of that flesh warmed before he was born by the same blood which it had bequeathed him to warm his own flesh with, to be bequeathed by him in turn to run hot and loud in veins and limbs after that first flesh and then his own were dead. So the Christmas came and he and Henry rode the forty miles to Sutpen’s Hundred, with Henry still talking, still keeping distended and light and iridescent with steady breathing that fairy balloon-vacuum in which the three of them existed, lived, moved even maybe, in attitudes without flesh—himself and the friend and the sister whom the friend had never seen and (though Henry did not know it) had not even thought about yet but only listened about from behind the more urgent thinking, and Henry probably not even noticing that the nearer they came to home the less Bon talked, had to say on any subject, and maybe even (and certainly Henry would not know this) listening less. And so he went into the house: and maybe somebody looking at him would have seen on his face an expression a good deal like the one—that proffering with humility yet with pride too, of complete surrender—which he had used to see on Henry’s face, and maybe he telling himself I not only dont know what it is I want but apparently I am a good deal younger than I thought also: and saw face to face the man who might be his father, and nothing happened—no shock, no hot communicated flesh that speech would have been too slow even to impede—nothing. And he spent ten days there, not only the esoteric, the sybarite, the steel blade in the silken tessellated sheath which Henry had begun to ape at the University, but the object of art, the mold and mirror of form and fashion which Mrs Sutpen (so your father said) accepted him as and insisted (didn’t your father say?) that he be (and would have purchased him as and paid for him with Judith even, if there had been no other bidder among the four of them—or didn’t your father say?) and which he did remain to her until he disappeared, taking Henry with him, and she never saw him again and war and trouble and grief and bad food filled her days until maybe she didn’t even remember after a while that she had ever forgot him. (And the girl, the sister, the virgin—Jesus, who to know what she saw that afternoon when they rode up the drive, what prayer, what maiden meditative dream ridden up out of whatever fabulous land, not in harsh stove iron but the silken and tragic Lancelot nearing thirty, ten years older than she was and wearied, sated with what experiences and pleasures, which Henry’s letters must have created for her.) And the day came to depart and no sign yet; he and Henry rode away and still no sign, no more sign at parting than when he had seen it first, in that face where he might (he would believe) have seen for himself the truth and so would have needed no sign, if it hadn’t been for the beard; no sign in the eyes which could see his face because there was no beard to hide it, could have seen the truth if it were there: yet no flicker in them: and so he knew it was in his face because he knew that the other had seen it there just exactly as Henry was to know the next Christmas eve in the library that his father was not lying by the fact that the father said nothing, did nothing. Maybe he even thought, wondered if perhaps that was not why the beard, if maybe the other had not hidden behind that beard against this very day, and if so, why? why? thinking But why? Why? since he wanted so little, could have understood if the other had wanted the signal to be in secret, would have been quick and glad to let it be in secret even if he could not have understood why, thinking in the middle of this My God, I am young, young, and I didn’t even know it; they didn’t even tell me, that I was young, feeling that same despair and shame like when you have to watch your father fail in physical courage, thinking, It should have been me that failed; me, I, not he who stemmed from that blood which we both bear before it could have become corrupt and tainted by whatever it was in mother’s that he could not brook.—Wait,” Shreve cried, though Quentin had not spoken: it had been merely some quality, some gathering of Quentin’s still laxed and hunched figure which presaged speech, because Shreve said Wait. Wait, before Quentin could have begun to speak. “Because he hadn’t even looked at her. Oh, he had seen her all right, he had had plenty of opportunity for that; he could not have helped but that because Mrs Sutpen would have seen to it—ten days of that kind of planned and arranged and executed privacies like the campaigns of dead generals in the textbooks, in libraries and parlors and drives in the buggy in the afternoons—all planned three months ago when Mrs Sutpen read Henry’s first letter with Bon’s name in it, until maybe even Judith too began to feel like the other one to a pair of goldfish: and him even talking to her too, or what talking he could have found to do to a country girl who probably never saw a man young or old before who sooner or later didn’t smell like manure; talking to her about like he would talk to the old dame on the gold chairs in the parlor, except that in the one case he would have to make all the conversation and in the other he would not even be able to make his own escape but would have to wait for Henry to come and get him. And maybe he had even thought about her by that time; maybe at the times when he would be telling himself it cant be so; he could not look at me like this every day and make no sign if it were so he would even tell himself She would be easy like when you have left the champagne on the supper table and are walking toward the whiskey on the sideboard and you happen to pass a cup of lemon sherbet on a tray and you look at the sherbet and tell yourself, That would be easy too only who wants it.—Does that suit you?”

“But it’s not love,” Quentin said.

“Because why not? Because listen. What was it the old dame, the Aunt Rosa, told you about how there are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that maybe are and it dont matter a damn whether they are or not? That was it. He just didn’t have time yet. Jesus, he must have known it would be. Like that lawyer thought, he wasn’t a fool; the trouble was, he wasn’t the kind of not-fool the lawyer thought he would be. He must have known it was going to happen. It would be like you passed that sherbet and maybe you knew you would even reach the sideboard and the whiskey, yet you knew that tomorrow morning you would want that sherbet, then you reached the whiskey and you knew you wanted that sherbet now; maybe you didn’t even go to the sideboard, maybe you even looked back at that champagne on the supper table among the dirty haviland and the crumpled damask, and all of a sudden you knew you didn’t want to go back there even. It would be no question of choosing, having to choose between the champagne or whiskey and the sherbet, but all of a sudden (it would be spring then, in that country where he had never spent a spring before and you said North Mississippi is a little harder country than Louisiana, with dogwood and violets and the early scentless flowers but the earth and the nights still a little cold and the hard tight sticky buds like young girls’ nipples on alder and Judas trees and beech and maple and even something young in the cedars like he never saw before) you find that you dont want anything but that sherbet and that you haven’t been wanting anything else but that and you have been wanting that pretty hard for some time—besides knowing that that sherbet is there for you to take. Not just for anybody to take but for you to take, knowing just from looking at that cup that it would be like a flower that, if any other hand reached for it, it would have thorns on it but not for your hand; and him not used to that since all the other cups that had been willing and easy for him to take up hadn’t contained sherbet but champagne or at least kitchen wine. And more than that. There was the knowing what he suspected might be so, or not knowing if it was so or not. And who to say if it wasn’t maybe the possibility of incest, because who (without a sister: I dont know about the others) has been in love and not discovered the vain evanescence of the fleshly encounter; who has not had to realize that when the brief all is done you must retreat from both love and pleasure, gather up your own rubbish and refuse—the hats and pants and shoes which you drag through the world—and retreat since the gods condone and practice these and the dreamy immeasurable coupling which floats oblivious above the trampling and harried instant, the: was-not: is: was: is a perquisite only of balloony and weightless elephants and whales: but maybe if there were sin too maybe you would not be permitted to escape, uncouple, return.—Aint that right?” He ceased, he could have been interrupted easily now. Quentin could have spoke now, but Quentin did not. He just sat as before, his hands in his trousers pockets, his shoulders hugged inward and hunched, his face lowered and he looking somehow curiously smaller than he actually was because of his actual height and spareness—that quality of delicacy about the bones, articulation, which even at twenty still had something about it, some last echo about it, of adolescence—that is, as compared with the cherubic burliness of the other who faced him, who looked younger, whose very superiority in bulk and displacement made him look even younger, as a plump boy of twelve who outweighs the other by twenty or thirty pounds still looks younger than the boy of fourteen who had that plumpness once and lost it, sold it (whether with his consent or not) for that state of virginity which is neither boy’s nor girl’s.

“I dont know,” Quentin said.

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

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

“You mean, it dont matter to you?” Quentin did not answer. “That’s right. Dont say it. Because I would know you are lying.—All right then. Listen. Because he never had to worry about the love because that would take care of itself. Maybe he knew there was a fate, a doom on him, like what the old Aunt Rosa told you about some things that just have to be whether they are or not, just to balance the books, write Paid on the old sheet so that whoever keeps them can take it out of the ledger and burn it, get rid of it. Maybe he knew then that whatever the old man had done, whether he meant well or ill by it, it wasn’t going to be the old man who would have to pay the check; and now that the old man was bankrupt with the incompetence of age, who should do the paying if not his sons, his get, because wasn’t it done that way in the old days? the old Abraham full of years and weak and incapable now of further harm, caught at last and the captains and the collectors saying, ‘Old man, we dont want you’ and Abraham would say, ‘Praise the Lord, I have raised about me sons to bear the burden of mine iniquities and persecutions; yea, perhaps even to restore my flocks and herds from the hand of the ravisher: that I might rest mine eyes upon my goods and chattels, upon the generations of them and of my descendants increased an hundred fold as my soul goeth out from me.’ He knew all the time that the love would take care of itself. Maybe that was why he didn’t have to think about her during those three months between that September and that Christmas while Henry talked about her to him, saying every time he breathed: Hers and my lives are to exist within and upon yours; did not need to waste any time over the love after it happened, backfired on him, why he never bothered to write her any letters (except that last one) which she would want to save, why he never actually proposed to her and gave her a ring for Mrs Sutpen to show around. Because the fate was on her too: the same old Abraham who was so old and weak now nobody would want him in the flesh on any debt; maybe he didn’t even have to wait for that Christmas to see her to know this; maybe that’s what it was that came out of the three months of Henry’s talking that he heard without listening to: I am not hearing about a young girl, a virgin; I am hearing about a narrow delicate fenced virgin field already furrowed and bedded so that all I shall need to do is drop the seeds in, caress it smooth again, saw her that Christmas and knew it for certain and then forgot it, went back to school and did not even remember that he had forgotten it, because he did not have time then; maybe it was just one day in that spring you told about when he stopped and said, right quiet: All right. I want to go to bed with who might be my sister. All right and then forgot that too. Because he didn’t have time. That is, he didn’t have anything else but time, because he had to wait. But not for her. That was all fixed. It was the other. Maybe he thought it would be in the mail bag each time the nigger rode over from Sutpen’s Hundred, and Henry believing it was the letter from her that he was waiting for, when what he was thinking was Maybe he will write it then. He would just have to write ‘I am your father. Burn this’ and I would do it. Or if not that, a sheet, a scrap of paper with the one word ‘Charles’ in his hand, and I would know what he meant and he would not even have to ask me to burn it. Or a lock of his hair or a paring from his finger nail and I would know them because I believe now that I have known what his hair and his finger nails would look like all my life, could choose that lock and that paring out of a thousand. And it did not come, and his letter went to her every two weeks and hers came back to him, and maybe he thought If one of mine to her should come back to me unopened then. That would be a sign. And that didn’t happen: and then Henry began to talk about his stopping at Sutpen’s Hundred for a day or so on his way home and he said all right to it, said It will be Henry who will get the letter, the letter saying it is inconvenient for me to come at that time; so apparently he does not intend to acknowledge me as his son, but at least I shall have forced him to admit that I am. And that one did not come either and the date was set and the family at Sutpen’s Hundred notified of it and that letter did not come either and he thought It will be then; I wronged him; maybe this is what he has been waiting for and maybe his heart sprang then, maybe he said Yes. Yes. I will renounce her; I will renounce love and all; that will be cheap, cheap, even though he say to me ‘never look upon my face again; take my love and my acknowledgment in secret, and go’ I will do that; I will not even demand to know of him what it was my mother did that justified his action toward her and me. So the day came and he and Henry rode the forty miles again, into the gates and up the drive to the house. He knew what would be there—the woman whom he had seen once and seen through, the girl whom he had seen through without even having to see once, the man whom he had seen daily, watched out of his fearful intensity of need and had never penetrated—the mother who had taken Henry aside before they had been six hours in the house on that Christmas visit and informed him of the engagement almost before the fiance had had time to associate the daughter’s name with the daughter’s face: so that probably before they even reached school again, and without his being aware that he had done so, Henry had already told Bon what was in his mother’s mind, (who had already told Bon what was in his); so that maybe before they even started on Bon’s second visit—(It would be June now and what would it be in North Mississippi? what was it you said; the magnolias in bloom and the mockingbirds, and in fifty years more, after they had gone and fought it and lost it and come back home, the Decoration Day and the veterans in the neat brushed hand-ironed gray and the spurious bronze medals that never meant anything to begin with, and the chosen young girls in white dresses bound at the waist with crimson sashes and the band would play Dixie and all the old doddering men would yell that you would not have thought would have had wind enough to get there, walk down town to sit on the rostrum even)—it would be June now, with the magnolias and mockingbirds in the moonlight and the curtains blowing in the June air of Commencement, and the music, fiddles and triangles, inside among the swirling and dipping hoops: and Henry would be a little tight, that should have been saying ‘I demand to know your intentions toward my sister’ but wasn’t saying it, instead maybe blushing again even in the moonlight, but standing straight and blushing because when you are proud enough to be humble you dont have to cringe (who every time he breathed over his vocal chords he was saying We belong to you; do as you will with us), saying ‘I used to think that I would hate the man that I would have to look at every day and whose every move and action and speech would say to me, I have seen and touched parts of your sister’s body that you will never see and touch: and now I know that I shall hate him and that’s why I want that man to be you,’ knowing that Bon would know what he meant, was trying to say, tell him, thinking, telling himself (Henry): Not just because he is older than I am and has known more than I shall ever know and has remembered more of it; but because of my own free will, and whether I knew it at the time or not does not matter, I gave my life and Judith’s both to him——”

“That’s still not love,” Quentin said.

“All right,” Shreve said. “Just listen.—They rode the forty miles and into the gates and up to the house. And this time Sutpen wasn’t even there. And Ellen didn’t even know where he had gone, believing blandly and volubly that he had gone to Memphis or maybe even to Saint Louis on business, and Henry and Judith not even caring that much, and only he, Bon, to know where Sutpen had gone, saying to himself Of course; he wasn’t sure; he had to go there to make sure, telling himself that loud now, loud and fast too so he would not, could not, hear the thinking, the But if he suspected, why not have told me? I would have done that, gone to him first, who have the blood after it was tainted and corrupt by whatever it was in mother; loud and fast now, telling himself That’s what it is; maybe he has gone on ahead to wait for me; he left no message for me here because the others are not to suspect yet and he knows that I will know at once where he is when I find him gone, thinking of the two of them, the somber vengeful woman who was his mother and the grim rocklike man who had looked at him every day for ten days with absolutely no alteration of expression at all, facing one another in grim armistice after almost thirty years in that rich baroque drawing room in that house which he called home since apparently everybody seemed to have to have a home, the man whom he was now sure was his father not humble now either (and he, Bon, proud of that), not saying even now I was wrong but I admit that it is so—Jesus, think of his heart then, during those two days, with the old gal throwing Judith at him every minute now because she had been spreading the news of the engagement confidentially through the county ever since Christmas—didn’t your father say how she had even taken Judith to Memphis in the spring to buy the trousseau?—and Judith neither having to accede to the throwing nor to resist it but just being, just existing and breathing like Henry did who maybe one morning during that spring waked up and lay right still in the bed and took stock, added the figures and drew the balance and told himself, All right. I am trying to make myself into what I think he wants me to be; he can do anything he wants to with me; he has only to tell me what to do and I will do it; even though what he asked me to do looked to me like dishonor, I would still do it, only Judith, being a female and so wiser than that, would not even consider dishonor: she would just say, All right. I will do anything he might ask me to do and that is why he will never ask me to do anything that I consider dishonorable: so that (maybe he even kissed her that time, the first time she had ever been kissed maybe and she too innocent to be coy or modest or even to know that she had been temporized with, maybe afterward just looking at him with a kind of peaceful and blank surprise at the fact that your sweetheart apparently kissed you the first time like your brother would—provided of course that your brother ever thought of, could be brought to, kissing you on the mouth)—so that when the two days were up and he was gone again and Ellen shrieking at her, ‘What?’ No engagement, no troth, no ring?’ she would be too astonished even to lie about it because that would be the first time it would have occurred to her that there had been no proposal.—Think of his heart then, while he rode to the River, and then on the steamboat itself where he walked up and down the deck, feeling through the deck the engines driving him nearer and nearer day and night to the moment which he must have realized now he had been waiting forever since he had got big enough to comprehend. Of course every now and then he would have to say it pretty fast and loud, That’s all it is. He just wants to make sure first to drown out the old But why do it this way? Why not back there? He knows that I shall never make any claim upon any part of what he now possesses, gained at the price of what sacrifice and endurance and scorn (so they told me; not he: they) only he knows; knows that so well that it would never have occurred to him just as he knows it would never occur to me that this might be his reason, who is not only generous but ruthless, who must have surrendered everything he and mother owned to her and to me as the price of repudiating her, not because the doing it this way hurt him, flouted him and kept him in suspense that much unnecessary longer, because he didn’t matter; whether he was irked or even crucified didn’t matter: it was the fact that he had to be kept constantly reminded that he would not have done it this way himself, yet he had stemmed from the blood after whatever it was his mother had been or done had tainted and corrupted it.—Nearer and nearer, until suspense and puzzlement and haste and all seemed blended into one sublimation of passive surrender in which he thought only All right. All right. Even this way. Even if he wants to do it this way. I will promise never to see her again. Never to see him again. Then he reached home. And he never learned if Sutpen had been there or not. He never knew. He believed it, but he never knew—his mother the same somber unchanged fierce paranoiac whom he had left in September, from whom he could learn nothing by indirection and whom he dared not ask outright—the very fact that he saw through the skillful questions of the lawyer (as to how he had liked the school and the people of that country and how perhaps—or had he not perhaps?—he had made friends up there among the country families) only that much more proof to him at that time that Sutpen had not been there, or at least the lawyer was not aware that he had, since now that he believed he had fathomed the lawyer’s design in sending him to that particular school to begin with, he saw nothing in the questions to indicate that the lawyer had learned anything new since. (Or what he could have learned in that interview with the lawyer, because it would be a short one; it would be next to the shortest one ever to transpire between them, the shortest one of all next to the last one of course, the one which would occur in the next summer, when Henry would be with him.) Because the lawyer would not dare risk asking him outright, just as he (Bon) did not dare to ask his mother outright. Because, though the lawyer believed him to be rather a fool than dull or dense, yet even he (the lawyer) never for one moment believed that even Bon was going to be the kind of a fool he was going to be. So he told the lawyer nothing and the lawyer told him nothing, and the summer passed and September came and still the lawyer (his mother too) had not once asked him if he wanted to return to the school. So that at last he had to say it himself, that he intended to return; and maybe he knew that he had lost that move since there was nothing whatever in the lawyer’s face save an agent’s acquiescence. So he returned to school, where Henry was waiting (oh yes; waiting) for him, who did not even say ‘You didn’t answer my letters. You didn’t even write to Judith’ who had already said What my sister and I have and are belongs to you but maybe he did write to Judith now, by the first nigger post which rode to Sutpen’s Hundred, about how it had been an uneventful summer and hence nothing to write about, with maybe Charles Bon plain and inelidable on the outside of the envelope and he thinking He will have to see that. Maybe he will send it back thinking Maybe if it comes back nothing will stop me then and so maybe at last I will know what I am going to do. But it didn’t come back. And the others didn’t come back. And the fall passed and Christmas came and they rode again to Sutpen’s Hundred and this time Sutpen was not there again, he was in the field, he had gone to town, he was hunting—something; Sutpen not there when they rode up and Bon knew he had not expected him to be there, saying Now. Now. Now. It will come now. It will come this time, and I am young, young, because I still dont know what I am going to do. So maybe what he was doing that twilight (because he knew that Sutpen had returned, was now in the house; it would be like a wind, something, dark and chill, breathing upon him and he stopping, grave, quiet, alert, thinking What? What is it? Then he would know; he could feel the other entering the house, and he would let his held breath go quiet and easy, a profound exhalation, his heart quiet too) in the garden while he walked with Judith and talked to her, gallant and elegant and automatic (and Judith thinking about that like she thought about that first kiss back in the summer: So that’s it. That’s what love is, bludgeoned once more by disappointment but still unbowed)—maybe what he was doing there now was waiting, telling himself Maybe even yet he will send for me. At least say it to me even though he knew better: He is in the library now, he has sent the nigger for Henry, now Henry is entering the room: so that maybe he stopped and faced her, with something in his face that was smiling now, and took her by the elbows and turned her, easy and gentle, until she faced the house, and said ‘Go. I wish to be alone to think about love’ and she went just as she took the kiss that day, with maybe the feel of the flat of his hand light and momentary upon her behind. And he stood there facing the house until Henry came out, and they looked at one another for a while with no word said and then turned and walked together through the garden, across the lot and into the stable, where maybe there was a nigger there and maybe they saddled the two horses themselves and waited until the house nigger came with the two repacked saddlebags. And maybe he didn’t even say then, ‘But he sent no word to me?’ ”

Shreve ceased. That is, for all the two of them, Shreve and Quentin, knew he had stopped, since for all the two of them knew he had never begun, since it did not matter (and possibly neither of them conscious of the distinction) which one had been doing the talking. So that now it was not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas Eve: four of them and then just two—Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry, the two of them both believing that Henry was thinking He (meaning his father) has destroyed us all, not for one moment thinking He (meaning Bon) must have known or at least suspected this all the time; that’s why he has acted as he has, why he did not answer my letters last summer nor write to Judith, why he has never asked her to marry him; believing that that must have occurred to Henry, certainly during that moment after Henry emerged from the house and he and Bon looked at one another for a while without a word then walked down to the stable and saddled the horses, but that Henry had just taken that in stride because he did not yet believe it even though he knew that it was true, because he must have now understood with complete despair the secret of his whole attitude toward Bon from that first instinctive moment when he had seen him a year and a quarter ago; he knew, yet he did not, had to refuse to, believe. So it was four of them who rode the two horses through that night and then across the bright frosty North Mississippi Christmas day, in something very like pariah-hood passing the plantation houses with sprigs of holly thrust beneath the knockers on the doors and mistletoe hanging from the chandeliers and bowls of eggnog and toddy on tables in the halls and the blue unwinded wood smoke standing above the plastered chimneys of the slave quarters, to the River and the steamboat. There would be Christmas on the boat too: the same holly and mistletoe, the same eggnog and toddy; perhaps, doubtless, a Christmas supper and a ball, but not for them: the two of them in the dark and the cold standing at the guard rail above the dark water and still not talking since there was nothing to say, the two of them (the four of them) held in that probation, that suspension, by Henry who knew but still did not believe, who was going deliberately to look upon and prove to himself that which, so Shreve and Quentin believed, would be like death for him to learn. So it was four of them still who got off the boat in New Orleans, which Henry had never seen before (whose entire cosmopolitan experience, apart from his sojourn at the school, consisted probably of one or two trips to Memphis with his father to buy live stock or slaves) and had no time to look at now—Henry who knew yet did not believe, and Bon whom Mr Compson had called a fatalist but who, according to Shreve and Quentin, did not resist Henry’s dictum and design for the reason that he neither knew nor cared what Henry intended to do because he had long since realized that he did not know yet what he himself was going to do—four of them who sat in that drawing room of baroque and fusty magnificence which Shreve had invented and which was probably true enough, while the Haiti-born daughter of the French sugar planter and the woman whom Sutpen’s first father-in-law had told him was a Spaniard (the slight dowdy woman with untidy gray-streaked raven hair coarse as a horse’s tail, with parchment-colored skin and implacable pouched black eyes which alone showed no age because they showed no forgetting, whom Shreve and Quentin had likewise invented and which was likewise probably true enough) told them nothing because she did not need to because she had already told it, who did not say, ‘My son is in love with your sister?’ but ‘So she has fallen in love with him’ and then sat laughing harshly and steadily at Henry who could not have lied to her even if he would have, who did not even have to answer at all either Yes or No.—Four of them there, in that room in New Orleans in 1860, just as in a sense there were four of them here in this tomblike room in Massachusetts in 1910. And Bon may have, probably did, take Henry to call on the octoroon mistress and the child, as Mr Compson said, though neither Shreve nor Quentin believed that the visit affected Henry as Mr Compson seemed to think. In fact, Quentin did not even tell Shreve what his father had said about the visit. Perhaps Quentin himself had not been listening when Mr Compson related it that evening at home; perhaps at that moment on the gallery in the hot September twilight Quentin took that in stride without even hearing it just as Shreve would have, since both he and Shreve believed—and were probably right in this too—that the octoroon and the child would have been to Henry only something else about Bon to be, not envied but aped if that had been possible, if there had been time and peace to ape it in—peace not between men of the same race and nation but peace between two young embattled spirits and the incontrovertible fact which embattled them, since neither Henry and Bon, anymore than Quentin and Shreve, were the first young men to believe (or at least apparently act on the assumption) that wars were sometimes created for the sole aim of settling youth’s private difficulties and discontents.

“So the old dame asked Henry that one question and then sat there laughing at him, so he knew then, they both knew then. And so now it would be short, this time with the lawyer, the shortest one of all. Because the lawyer would have been watching him; maybe there had even been a letter during that second fall while the lawyer was waiting and still nothing seemed to be happening up there (and maybe the lawyer was the reason why Bon never answered Henry’s and Judith’s letters during that summer: because he never got them)—a letter, two or maybe three pages of your humble and obedient e and t and c that boiled down to eighteen words I know you are a fool, but just what kind of a fool are you going to be? and Bon was at least enough of a not-fool to do the boiling down.—Yes, watching him, not concerned yet, just considerably annoyed, giving Bon plenty of time to come to him, giving him all of a week maybe (after he—the lawyer—would have contrived to get hold of Henry and find out a good deal of what Henry was thinking without Henry ever knowing it) before he would contrive Bon too, and maybe so good at the contriving that even Bon would not know at once what was coming. It would be a short one. It would be no secret between them now; it would just be unsaid: the lawyer behind the desk (and maybe in the secret drawer the ledger where he had just finished adding in the last past year’s interest compounded between the intrinsic and the love and pride at two hundred percent.)—the lawyer fretted, annoyed, but not at all concerned since he not only knew he had the screws, but he still did not really believe that Bon was that kind of a fool, though he was about to alter his opinion somewhat about the dullness, or at least the backwardness—the lawyer watching him and saying, smooth and oily, since it would be no secret now, who would know now that Bon knew all he would ever know or would need to know to make the coup: ‘Do you know that you are a very fortunate young man? With most of us, even when we are lucky enough to get our revenge, we must pay for it, sometimes in actual dollars. While you are not only in a position to get your revenge, clear your mother’s name, but the balm with which you will assuage her injury will have a collateral value which can be translated into the things which a young man needs, which are his due and which, whether we like it or not, may be had only in exchange for hard dollars—’ and Bon not saying What do you mean? and not moving yet; that is, the lawyer would not be aware that he was beginning to move, continuing (the lawyer) smooth and easy: ‘And more than this, than the revenge, as lagniappe to the revenge as it were, this nosegay of an afternoon, this scentless prairie flower which will not be missed and which might as well bloom in your lapel as in another’s; this—How do you young men put it?—a nice little piece—’ and then he would see Bon, maybe the eyes, maybe he would just hear the feet moving. And then, pistol (derringer, horse pistol, revolver, whatever it was) and all, he would be crouched back against the wall behind the overturned chair, snarling, ‘Stand back! Stop!’ then screaming ‘Help! Help! He—!’ then just screaming, because he would hear and feel his own wrenching bones before he could free his fingers of the pistol, and his neck bone too as Bon would strike him with the palm on one cheek and then with the back of the hand on the other; maybe he could even hear Bon too saying, ‘Stop it. Hush. I’m not going to hurt you’ or maybe it was the lawyer in him that said the Hush which he obeyed, who got him back into the righted chair again, half lying upon the desk; the lawyer in him that warned him not to say You will pay for this but instead to half lie there, nursing his wrenched hand in his handkerchief while Bon stood looking down at him, holding the pistol by the barrel against his leg, saying, ‘If you feel that you require satisfaction, of course you know—’ and the lawyer, sitting back now, dabbing the handkerchief at his cheek now: ‘I was wrong. I misunderstood your feeling about the matter. I ask your pardon’ and Bon: ‘Granted. As you wish. I will accept either an apology or a bullet, as you prefer’ and the lawyer (there would be a faint fading red in his cheek, but that would be all: nothing in the voice or in the eyes): ‘I see you are going to collect full measure for my unfortunate misconception—even ridicule. Even if I felt that right was on my side (which I do not) I would still have to decline your offer. I would not be your equal with pistols’ and Bon: ‘Nor with knives or rapiers too?’ and the lawyer, smooth and easy: ‘Nor knives or rapiers too.’ So that now the lawyer wouldn’t even need to say You will pay for this because Bon would be saying that for him, who would stand there with the lax pistol, thinking But only with knives or pistols or rapiers. So I cant beat him. I could shoot him. I would shoot him with no more compunction than I would a snake or a man who cuckolded me. But he would still beat me. Thinking Yes. He did beat me while he—he—(Listen,” Shreve said, cried. “It would be while he would be lying in a bedroom of that private house in Corinth after Pittsburgh Landing while his shoulder got well two years later and the letter from the octoroon (maybe even the one that contained the photograph of her and the child) finally overtaking him, wailing for money and telling him that the lawyer had departed for Texas or Mexico or somewhere at last and that she (the octoroon) could not find his mother either and so without doubt the lawyer had murdered her before he stole the money, since it would be just like both of them to flee or get themselves killed without providing for her at all.)—Yes, they knew now. And Jesus, think of him, Bon, who had wanted to know, who had had the most reason to want to know, who as far as he knew had never had any father but had been created somehow between that woman who wouldn’t let him play with other children, and that lawyer who even told the woman whether or not each time she bought a piece of meat or a loaf of bread—two people neither of whom had taken pleasure or found passion in getting him or suffered pain and travail in borning him—who perhaps if one of the two had only told him the truth, none of what happened would ever have come to pass; while there was Henry who had father and security and contentment and all, yet was told the truth by both of them while he (Bon) was told by neither. And think of Henry, who had said at first it was a lie and then when he knew it was not a lie had still said ‘I dont believe it,’ who had found even in that ‘I dont believe it’ enough of strength to repudiate home and blood in order to champion his defiance, and in which championing he proved his contention to be the false one and was more than ever interdict against returning home; Jesus, think of the load he had to carry, born of two Methodists (or of one long invincible line of Methodists) and raised in provincial North Mississippi, faced with incest, incest of all things that might have been reserved for him, that all his heredity and training had to rebel against on principle, and in a situation where he knew that neither incest nor training was going to help him solve it. So that maybe when they left and walked the streets that night and at last Bon said, ‘Well? Now what?’ Henry said, ‘Wait. Wait. Let me get used to it.’ And maybe it was two days or three days, and Henry said, ‘You shall not. Shall not’ and then it was Bon that said, ‘Wait. I am your older brother: do you say shall not to me?’ And maybe it was a week, maybe Bon took Henry to see the octoroon and Henry looked at her and said, ‘Aint that enough for you?’ and Bon said, ‘Do you want it to be enough?’ and Henry said, ‘Wait. Wait. I must have time to get used to it. You will have to give me time.’ Jesus, think how Henry must have talked during that winter and then that spring with Lincoln elected and the Alabama convention and the South began to draw out of the Union, and then there were two presidents in the United States and the telegraph brought the news about Charleston and Lincoln called out his army and it was done, irrevocable now, and Henry and Bon already decided to go without having to consult one another, who would have gone anyway even if they had never seen one another but certainly now, because after all you dont waste a war—think how they must have talked, how Henry would say, ‘But must you marry her? Do you have to do it?’ and Bon would say, ‘He should have told me. He should have told me, myself, himself. I was fair and honorable with him. I waited. You know now why I waited. I gave him every chance to tell me himself. But he didn’t do it. If he had, I would have agreed and promised never to see her or you or him again. But he didn’t tell me. I thought at first it was because he didn’t know. Then I knew that he did know, and still I waited. But he didn’t tell me. He just told you, sent me a message like you send a command by a nigger servant to a beggar or a tramp to clear out. Dont you see that?’ and Henry would say, ‘But Judith. Our sister. Think of her’ and Bon: ‘All right. Think of her. Then what?’ because they both knew what Judith would do when she found it out because they both knew that women will show pride and honor about almost anything except love, and Henry said, ‘Yes. I see. I understand. But you will have to give me time to get used to it. You are my older brother; you can do that little for me.’ Think of the two of them: Bon who didn’t know what he was going to do and had to say, pretend, he did; and Henry who knew what he was going to do and had to say he didn’t. Then it was Christmas again, then 1861, and they hadn’t heard from Judith because Judith didn’t know for sure where they were because Henry wouldn’t let Bon write to her yet; then they heard about the company, the University Greys, organizing up at Oxford and maybe they had been waiting for that. So they took the steamboat North again, and more gayety and excitement on the boat now than Christmas even, like it always is when a war starts, before the scene gets cluttered up with bad food and wounded soldiers and widows and orphans, and them taking no part in it now either but standing at the rail again above the churning water, and maybe it would be two or three days, then Henry said suddenly, cried suddenly: ‘But kings have done it! Even dukes! There was that Lorraine duke named John something that married his sister. The Pope excommunicated him but it didn’t hurt! It didn’t hurt! They were still husband and wife. They were still alive. They still loved!’ then again, loud, fast: ‘But you will have to wait! You will have to give me time! Maybe the war will settle it and we wont need to!’ And maybe this was one place where your old man was right: and they rode into Oxford without touching Sutpen’s Hundred and signed the company roster and then hid somewhere to wait, and Henry let Bon write Judith one letter; they would send it by hand, by a nigger that would steal into the quarters by night and give it to Judith’s maid, and Judith sent the picture in the metal case and they rode on ahead to wait until the company got through making flags and riding about the state telling girls farewell and started for the front.

“Jesus, think of them. Because Bon would know what Henry was doing, just as he had always known what Henry was thinking since that first day when they had looked at one another. Maybe he would know all the better what Henry was doing because he did not know what he himself was going to do, that he would not know until all of a sudden some day it would burst clear and he would know then that he had known all the time what it would be, so he didn’t have to bother about himself and so all he had to do was just to watch Henry trying to reconcile what he (Henry) knew he was going to do with all the voices of his heredity and training which said No. No. You cannot. You must not. You shall not. Maybe they would even be under fire now, with the shells rushing and rumbling past overhead and bursting and them lying there waiting to charge and Henry would cry again, ‘But that Lorraine duke did it! There must have been lots in the world who have done it that people dont know about, that maybe they suffered for it and died for it and are in hell now for it. But they did it and it dont matter now; even the ones we do know about are just names now and it dont matter now’ and Bon watching him and listening to him and thinking It’s because I dont know myself what I am going to do and so he is aware that I am undecided without knowing that he is aware. Perhaps if I told him now that I am going to do it, he would know his own mind and tell me, You shall not. And maybe your old man was right that time and they did think maybe the war would settle it and they would not have to themselves, or at least maybe Henry hoped it would because maybe your old man was right here too and Bon didn’t care; that since both of the two people who could have given him a father had declined to do it, nothing mattered to him now, revenge or love or all, since he knew now that revenge could not compensate him nor love assuage. Maybe it wasn’t even Henry who wouldn’t let him write to Judith but Bon himself who did not write her because he didn’t care about anything, not even that he didn’t know yet what he was going to do. Then it was the next year and Bon was an officer now and they were moving toward Shiloh without knowing that either, talking again as they moved along in column, the officer dropping back alongside the file in which the private marched and Henry crying again, holding his desperate and urgent voice down to undertone: ‘Dont you know yet what you are going to do?’ while Bon would look at him for a moment with that expression which could have been smiling: ‘Suppose I told you I did not intend to go back to her?’ and Henry would walk there beside him, with his pack and his eight feet of musket, and he would begin to pant, panting and panting while Bon watched him: ‘I am out in front of you a lot now; going into battle, charging, I will be out in front of you—’ and Henry panting, ‘Stop! Stop!’ and Bon watching him with that faint thin expression about the mouth and eyes:’—and who would ever know? You would not even have to know for certain yourself, because who could say but what a Yankee ball might have struck me at the exact second you pulled your trigger, or even before—’ and Henry panting and looking, glaring at the sky, with his teeth showing and the sweat on his face and the knuckles of the hand on his musket butt white, saying, panting, ‘Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!’ Then it was Shiloh, the second day and the lost battle and the brigade falling back from Pittsburgh Landing—And listen,” Shreve cried; “wait, now; wait!” (glaring at Quentin, panting himself, as if he had had to supply his shade not only with a cue but with breath to obey it in): “Because your old man was wrong here, too! He said it was Bon who was wounded, but it wasn’t. Because who told him? Who told Sutpen, or your grandfather either, which of them it was who was hit? Sutpen didn’t know because he wasn’t there, and your grandfather wasn’t there either because that was where he was hit too, where he lost his arm. So who told them? Not Henry, because his father never saw Henry but that one time and maybe they never had time to talk about wounds and besides to talk about wounds in the Confederate army in 1865 would be like coal miners talking about soot; and not Bon, because Sutpen never saw him at all because he was dead—it was not Bon, it was Henry; Bon that found Henry at last and stooped to pick him up and Henry fought back, struggled, saying, ‘Let be! Let me die! I wont have to know it then’ and Bon said, ‘So you do want me to go back to her’ and Henry lay there struggling and panting, with the sweat on his face and his teeth bloody inside his chewed lip, and Bon said, ‘Say you do want me to go back to her. Maybe then I wont do it. Say it’ and Henry lay there struggling, with the fresh red staining through his shirt and his teeth showing and the sweat on his face until Bon held his arms and lifted him onto his back——”

First, two of them, then four; now two again. The room was indeed tomblike: a quality stale and static and moribund beyond any mere vivid and living cold. Yet they remained in it, though not thirty feet away was bed and warmth. Quentin had not even put on his overcoat, which lay on the floor where it had fallen from the arm of the chair where Shreve had put it down. They did not retreat from the cold. They both bore it as though in deliberate flagellant exaltation of physical misery transmogrified into the spirits’ travail of the two young men during that time fifty years ago, or forty-eight rather, then forty-seven and then forty-six, since it was ’64 and then ’65 and the starved and ragged remnant of an army having retreated across Alabama and Georgia and into Carolina, swept onward not by a victorious army behind it but rather by a mounting tide of the names of lost battles from either side—Chickamauga and Franklin, Vicksburg and Corinth and Atlanta—battles lost not alone because of superior numbers and failing ammunition and stores, but because of generals who should not have been generals, who were generals not through training in contemporary methods or aptitude for learning them, but by the divine right to say ‘Go there’ conferred upon them by an absolute caste system; or because the generals of it never lived long enough to learn how to fight massed cautious accretionary battles, since they were already as obsolete as Richard or Roland or du Gueselin, who wore plumes and cloaks lined with scarlet at twenty-eight and thirty and thirty-two and captured warships with cavalry charges but no grain nor meat nor bullets, who would whip three separate armies in as many days and then tear down their own fences to cook meat robbed from their own smokehouses, who on one night and with a handful of men would gallantly set fire to and destroy a million dollar garrison of enemy supplies and on the next night be discovered by a neighbor in bed with his wife and be shot to death—two, four, now two again, according to Quentin and Shreve, the two the four the two still talking—the one who did not yet know what he was going to do, the other who knew what he would have to do yet could not reconcile himself—Henry citing himself authority for incest, talking about his Duke John of Lorraine as if he hoped possibly to evoke that condemned and excommunicated shade to tell him in person that it was all right, as people both before and since have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon—the two the four the two facing one another in the tomblike room: Shreve, the Canadian, the child of blizzards and of cold in a bathrobe with an overcoat above it, the collar turned up about his ears; Quentin, the Southerner, the morose and delicate offspring of rain and steamy heat in the thin suitable clothing which he had brought from Mississippi, his overcoat (as thin and vain for what it was as the suit) lying on the floor where he had not even bothered to raise it:

(——the winter of ’64 now, the army retreated across Alabama, into Georgia; now Carolina was just at their backs and Bon, the officer, thinking ‘We will either he caught and annihilated or Old Joe will extricate us and we will make contact with Lee in front of Richmond and then we will at least have the privilege of surrender’: and then one day all of a sudden he thought of it, remembered, how that Jefferson regiment of which his father was now colonel was in Longstreet’s corps, and maybe from that moment the whole purpose of the retreat seemed to him to be that of bringing him within reach of his father, to give his father one more chance. So that it must have seemed to him now that he knew at last why he had not been able to decide what he wanted to do. Maybe he thought for just a second, ‘My God, I am still young; even after these four years I am still young’ but just for a second, because maybe in the same breath he said, ‘All right. Then I am young. But I still believe, even though what I believe probably is that war, suffering, these four years of keeping his men alive and able in order to swap them blood and flesh for the largest amount of ground at its bargain price, will have changed him (which I know that it does not do) to where he will say to me not: Forgive me: but: You are my oldest son. Protect your sister; never see either of us again:’ Then it was ’65 and what was left of the army of the West with nothing remaining now but the ability to walk backward slow and stubborn and to endure musketry and shelling; maybe they didn’t even miss the shoes and overcoats and food any more now and that was why he could write about the captured stove polish like he did in the letter to Judith when he finally knew what he was going to do at last and told Henry and Henry said ‘Thank God. Thank God,’ not for the incest of course but because at last they were going to do something, at last he could be something even though that something was the irrevocable repudiation of the old heredity and training and the acceptance of eternal damnation. Maybe he could even quit talking about his Lorraine duke then, because he could say now, ‘It isn’t yours nor his nor the Pope’s hell that we are all going to: it’s my mother’s and her mother’s and father’s and their mother’s and father’s hell, and it isn’t you who are going there, but we, the three—no: four of us. And so at least we will all be together where we belong, since even if only he went there we would still have to be there too since the three of us are just illusions that he begot, and your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory. And we will all be together in torment and so we will not need to remember love and fornication, and maybe in torment you cannot even remember why you are there. And if we cannot remember all this, it cant be much torment.’ Then they were in Carolina, that January and February of ’65 and what was left of them had been walking backward for almost a year now and the distance between them and Richmond was less far than the distance they had come; the distance between them and the end a good deal less far. But to Bon it was not the space between them and defeat but the space between him and the other regiment, between him and the hour, the moment: He will not even have to ask me; I will just touch flesh with him and I will say it myself: You will not need to worry; she shall never see me again.’ Then March in Carolina and still the walking backward slow and stubborn and listening to the Northward now because there was nothing to hear from any other direction because in all the other directions it was finished now, and all they expected to hear from the North was defeat. Then one day (he was an officer; he would have known, heard, that Lee had detached some troops and sent them down to reinforce them; perhaps he even knew the names and numbers of the regiments before they arrived) he saw Sutpen. Maybe that first time Sutpen actually did not see him, maybe that first time he could tell himself, ‘That was why; he didn’t see me,’ so that he had to put himself in Sutpen’s way, make his chance and situation. Then for the second time he looked at the expressionless and rocklike face, at the pale boring eyes in which there was no flicker, nothing, the face in which he saw his own features, in which he saw recognition, and that was all. That was all, there was nothing further now; perhaps he just breathed once quietly, with on his own face that expression which might at a glance have been called smiling while he thought, ‘I could force him. I could go to him and force him,’ knowing that he would not because it was all finished now, that was all of it now and at last. And maybe it was that same night or maybe a night a week later while they were stopped (because even Sherman would have to stop sometimes at night) with the fires burning for warmth at least because at least warmth is cheap and doesn’t remain consumed, that Bon said, ‘Henry’ and said, ‘It wont be much longer now and then there wont be anything left: we wont even have anything to do left, not even the privilege of walking backward slowly for a reason, for the sake of honor and what’s left of pride. Not God; evidently we have done without Him for four years, only He just didn’t think to notify us; and not only not shoes and clothing but not even any need for them, and not only no land nor any way to make food, but no need for the food since we have learned to live without that too; and so if you dont have God and you dont need food and clothes and shelter, there isn’t anything for honor and pride to climb on and hold to and flourish. And if you haven’t got honor and pride, then nothing matters. Only there is something in you that doesn’t care about honor and pride yet that lives, that even walks backward for a whole year just to live; that probably even when this is over and there is not even defeat left, will still decline to sit still in the sun and die, but will be out in the woods, moving and seeking where just will and endurance could not move it, grubbing for roots and such—the old mindless sentient undreaming meat that doesn’t even know any difference between despair and victory, Henry.’ And then Henry would begin to say ‘Thank God. Thank God’ panting and saying ‘Thank God,’ saying, ‘Dont try to explain it. Just do it’ and Bon: ‘You authorize me? As her brother you give me permission?’ and Henry: ‘Brother? Brother? You are the oldest: why do you ask me?’ and Bon: ‘No. He has never acknowledged me. He just warned me. You are the brother and the son. Do I have your permission, Henry?’ and Henry: ‘Write. Write. Write.’ So Bon wrote the letter, after the four years, and Henry read it and sent it off. But they didn’t quit then and follow the letter. They still walked backward, slow and stubborn, listening toward the North for the end of it because it takes an awful lot of character to quit anything when you are losing, and they had been walking backward slow for a year now so all they had left was not the will but just the ability, the grooved habit to endure. Then one night they had stopped again since Sherman had stopped again, and an orderly came along the bivouac line and found Henry at last and said, ‘Sutpen, the colonel wants you in his tent.’)

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

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

—Hey, Reb.

—Yah.

—Where you fellers going?

—Richmond.

—So are we. Why not wait for us?

—We air.

The men about the fires would not hear this exchange, though they would presently hear the orderly plainly enough as he passes from fire to fire, asking for Sutpen and being directed on and so reaches the fire at last, the smoldering log, with his monotonous speech: ‘Sutpen? I’m looking for Sutpen’ until Henry sits up and says, ‘Here.’ He is gaunt and ragged and unshaven; because of the last four years and because he had not quite got his height when the four years began, he is not as tall by two inches as he gave promise of being, and not as heavy by thirty pounds as he probably will be a few years after he has outlived the four years, if he do outlive them.

—Here, he says—What is it?

—The colonel wants you.

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

—Sutpen, Henry says—The colonel sent for me.

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

—Henry.

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

—Henry, Sutpen says—My son.

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

—You were hit at Shiloh, Colonel Willow tells me, Sutpen says.

—Yes, sir, Henry says.

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

—I have seen Charles Bon, Henry.

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

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

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

—He cannot marry her, Henry.

Now Henry speaks.

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

—He must not marry her, Henry.

—Yes. I said Yes at first, but I was not decided then. I didn’t let him. But now I have had four years to decide in. I will. I am going to.

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

Nor did Henry ever say that he did not remember leaving the tent. He remembers all of it. He remembers stooping through the entrance again and passing the sentry again; he remembers walking back down the cut and rutted road, stumbling in the dark among the ruts on either side of which the fires have now died to embers, so that he can barely distinguish the men sleeping on the earth about them. It must be better than eleven oclock, he thinks. And another eight miles tomorrow. If it were only not for those damned guns. Why doesn’t Old Joe give the guns to Sherman. Then we could make twenty miles a day. We could join Lee then. At least Lee stops and fights some of the time. He remembers it. He remembers how he did not return to his fire but stopped presently in a lonely place and leaned against a pine, leaning quietly and easily, with his head back so he could look up at the shabby shaggy branches like something in wrought iron spreading motionless against the chill vivid stars of early spring, thinking I hope he remembers to thank Colonel Willow for letting us use his tent, thinking not what he would do but what he would have to do. Because he knew what he would do; it now depended on what Bon would do, would force him to do, since he knew that he would do it. So I must go to him, he thought, thinking, Now it is better than two oclock and it will be dawn soon.

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

—Wait.

Bon pauses and looks at Henry; now he can see Henry’s face. He says,

—You will be cold. You are cold now. You haven’t been asleep, have you? Here.

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

—No, Henry says.

—Yes. Take it. I’ll get my blanket.

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

—So it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear.

Henry doesn’t answer.

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

—No! Henry cries.—No! No! I will—I’ll——

He springs up; his face is working; Bon can see his teeth within the soft beard which covers his sunken cheeks, and the whites of Henry’s eyes as though the eyeballs struggled in their sockets as the panting breath struggled in his lungs—the panting which ceased, the breath held, the eyes too looking down at him where he sat on the log, the voice now not much louder than an expelled breath:

—You said, could have stopped you. What do you mean by that?

Now it is Bon who does not answer, who sits on the log looking at the face stooped above him. Henry says, still in that voice no louder than breathing:

—But now? You mean you——

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

—Think of her. Not of me: of her.

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

—No, Henry says.—No. No.

—I cannot?

—You shall not.

—Who will stop me, Henry?

—No, Henry says.—No. No. No.

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

—Then do it now, he says.

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

—You are my brother.

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

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

—Do it now, Henry, he says.

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” Quentin said.

“Come on,” Shreve said. “Let’s get out of this refrigerator and go to bed.”