“And I’m tired too. I done toted it a long time now. But we had to look after them chickens so we could put the money in the letter every month—”
“And she still took the money? even after she came and saw, she still took it? And after Judith saw, she still sent it?”
She answered immediately, abrupt, levelvoiced: “Who are you, questioning what a Sutpen does?”
“I’m sorry. When did Henry come home?”
“Right after she left, I carried two letters to the train one day. One of them had Henry Sutpen on it. I knowed how that looked wrote out, too.”
“Oh. Judith knew where Henry was. And she wrote him after she saw the woman. Why did she wait until then?”
“Aint I told you Judith knew soon as she saw that woman, same as I knew soon as I saw?”
“But you never did tell me what. What is there about this woman? Dont you see, if you dont tell me that, the story wont make sense.”
“It done made enough sense to put three folks in their graves. How much more sense you want it to make?”
“Yes,” I said. “And so Henry came home.”
“Not right then. One day, about a year after she was here, Judith gave me another letter with Henry Sutpen on it. It was all fixed up, ready to go on the train. ‘You’ll know when to send it,’ Judith said. And I told her I would know the time when it come. And then the time come and Judith said, ‘I reckon you can send that letter now’ and I said ‘I done already sent it three days ago.’
“And four nights later Henry rode up and we went to Judith in the bed and she said, ‘Henry. Henry, I’m tired. I’m so tired, Henry.’ And we never needed no doctor then and no preacher, and I aint going to need no doctor now and no preacher neither.”
“And Henry has been here forty years, hidden in the house. My God.”
“That’s forty years longer than any of the rest of them stayed. He was a young man then, and when them dogs would begin to get old he would leave at night and be gone two days and come back the next night with another dog just like urn. But he aint young now and last time I went myself to get the new dog. But he aint going to need no more dog. And I aint young neither, and I going soon too. Because I tired as Judith, too.”
It was quiet in the kitchen, still, blackdark. Outside the summer midnight was filled with insects; somewhere a mockingbird sang. “Why did you do all this for Henry Sutpen? Didn’t you have your own life to live, your own family to raise?”
She spoke, her voice not waisthigh, level, quiet. “Henry Sutpen is my brother.”
V
We stood in the dark kitchen. “And so he wont live until morning. And nobody here but you.”
“I been enough for three of them before him.”
“Maybe I’d better stay too. Just in case.…”
Her voice came level, immediate: “In case what?” I didn’t answer. I could not hear her breathe at all. “I been plenty enough for three of them. I dont need no help. You done found out now. You go on away from here and write your paper piece.”
“I may not write it at all.”
“I bound you wouldn’t, if Henry Sutpen was in his right mind and strength. If I was to go up there now and say, ‘Henry Sutpen, here a man going to write in the papers about you and your paw and your sister,’ what you reckon he’d do?”
“I dont know. What would he do?”
“Nummine that. You done heard now. You go away from here. You let Henry Sutpen die quiet. That’s all you can do for him.”
“Maybe that’s what he would do: just say, ‘Let me die quiet.’ ”
“That’s what I doing, anyway. You go away from here.”
So that’s what I did. She called the dog to the kitchen window and I could hear her talking to it quietly as I let myself out the front door and went on down the drive. I expected the dog to come charging around the house after me and tree me too, but it didn’t. Perhaps that was what decided me. Or perhaps it was just that human way of justifying meddling with the humanities. Anyway, I stopped where the rusted and now hingeless iron gate gave upon the road and I stood there for a while, in the myriad, peaceful, summer country midnight. The lamp in the cabin was black now, and the house too was invisible beyond the cedartunnelled drive, the massed cedars which hid it shaggy on the sky. And there was no sound save the bugs, the insects silversounding in the grass, and the senseless mockingbird. And so I turned and went back up the drive to the house.
I still expected the dog to come charging around the corner, barking. ‘And then she will know I didn’t play fair,’ I thought. ‘She will know I lied to her like Charles Bon lied to Henry Sutpen.’ But the dog didn’t come. It didn’t appear until I had been sitting on the top step for some time, my back against a column. Then it was there: it appeared without a sound, standing on the earth below the steps, looming, shadowy, watching me. I made no sound, no move. After a while it went away, as silent as it came. The shadow of it made one slow dissolving movement and disappeared.
It was quite still. There was a faint constant sighing high in the cedars, and I could hear the insects and the mockingbird. Soon there were two of them, answering one another, brief, quiring, risinginflectioned. Soon the sighing cedars, the insects and the birds became one peaceful sound bowled inside the skull in monotonous miniature, as if all the earth were contracted and reduced to the dimensions of a baseball, into and out of which shapes, fading, emerged fading and faded emerging:
“And you were killed by the last shot fired in the war?”
“I was so killed. Yes.”
“Who fired the last shot fired in the war?”
“Was it the last shot you fired in the war, Henry?”
“I fired a last shot in the war; yes.”
“You depended on the war, and the war betrayed you too; was that it?”
“Was that it, Henry?”
“What was wrong with that woman, Henry? There was something the matter that was worse to you than the marriage. Was it the child? But Raby said the child was nine after Colonel Sutpen died in ’70. So it must have been born after Charles and Judith married. Was that how Charles Bon lied to you?”
“What was it that Judith knew and Raby knew as soon as they saw her?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. And you have lived hidden here for forty years.”
“I have lived here forty years.”
“Were you at peace?”
“I was tired.”
“That’s the same thing, isn’t it? For you and Raby too.”
“Same thing. Same as me. I tired too.”
“Why did you do all this for Henry Sutpen?”
“He was my brother.”
VI
The whole thing went off like a box of matches. I came out of sleep with the deep and savage thunder of the dog roaring over my head and I stumbled past it and down the steps running before I was good awake, awake at all, perhaps. I remember the thin, mellow, farcarrying negro voices from the cabin beyond the pasture, and then I turned still half asleep and saw the façade of the house limned in fire, and the erstblind sockets of the windows, so that the entire front of the house seemed to loom stooping above me in a wild and furious exultation. The dog, howling, was hurling itself against the locked front door, then it sprang from the porch and ran around toward the back.
I followed, running; I was shouting too. The kitchen was already gone, and the whole rear of the house was on fire, and the roof too; the light, longdried shingles taking wing and swirling upward like scraps of burning paper, burning out zenithward like inverted shooting stars. I ran back toward the front of the house, still yelling. The dog passed me, fulltongued, frantic; as I watched the running figures of negro women coming up across the redglared pasture I could hear the dog hurling itself again and again against the front door.
The negroes came up, the three generations of them, their eyeballs white, their open mouths pinkly cavernous. “They’re in
there, I tell you!” I was yelling. “She set fire to it and they are both in there. She told me Henry Sutpen would not be alive by morning, but I didn’t—” In the roaring I could scarce hear myself, and I could not hear the negroes at all for a time. I could only see their open mouths, their fixed, whitecircled eyeballs. Then the roaring reached that point where the ear loses it and it rushes soundless up and away, and I could hear the negroes. They were making a long, concerted, wild, measured wailing, in harmonic pitch from the treble of the children to the soprano of the oldest woman, the daughter of the woman in the burning house; they might have rehearsed it for years, waiting for this irrevocable moment out of all time. Then we saw the woman in the house.
We were standing beneath the wall, watching the clapboards peel and melt away, obliterating window after window, and we saw the old negress come to the window upstairs. She came through fire and she leaned for a moment in the window, her hands on the burning ledge, looking no bigger than a doll, as impervious as an effigy of bronze, serene, dynamic, musing in the foreground of Holocaust. Then the whole house seemed to collapse, to fold in upon itself, melting; the dog passed us again, not howling now. It came opposite us and then turned and sprang into the roaring dissolution of the house without a sound, without a cry.
I think I said that the sound had now passed beyond the outraged and surfeited ear. We stood there and watched the house dissolve and liquefy and rush upward in silent and furious scarlet, licking and leaping among the wild and blazing branches of the cedars, so that, blazing, melting too, against the soft, mildstarred sky of summer they too wildly tossed and swirled.
VII
Just before dawn it began to rain. It came up fast, without thunder or lightning, and it rained hard all forenoon, lancing into the ruin so that above the gaunt, unfallen chimneys and the charred wood a thick canopy of steam unwinded floated. But after a while the steam dispersed and we could walk among the beams and plank ends. We moved gingerly, however, the negroes in nondescript outer garments against the rain, quiet too, not chanting now, save the oldest woman, the grandmother, who was singing a hymn monotonously as she moved here and there, pausing now and then to pick up something. It was she who found the picture in the metal case, the picture of Judith which Charles Bon had owned. “I’ll take that,” I said.
She looked at me. She was a shade darker than the mother. But there was still the Indian, faintly; still the Sutpen, in her face. “I dont reckon mammy would like that. She particular about Sutpen property.”
“I talked to her last night. She told me about it, about everything. It’ll be all right.” She watched me, my face. “I’ll buy it from you, then.”
“It aint none of mine to sell.”
“Just let me look at it, then. I’ll give it back. I talked to her last night. It’ll be all right.”
She gave it to me then. The case was melted a little; the lock which Judith had hammered shut for all time melted now into a thin streak along the seam, to be lifted away with a knifeblade, almost. But it took an axe to open it.
The picture was intact. I looked at the face and I thought quietly, stupidly (I was a little idiotic myself, with sleeplessness and wet and no breakfast)—I thought quietly, ‘Why, I thought she was blonde. They told me Judith was blonde.…’ Then I came awake, alive. I looked quietly at the face: the smooth, oval, unblemished face, the mouth rich, full, a little loose, the hot, slumbrous, secretive eyes, the inklike hair with its faint but unmistakable wiriness—all the ineradicable and tragic stamp of negro blood. The inscription was in French: A mon mari. Toujours. 12 Aout, 1860. And I looked again quietly at the doomed and passionate face with its thick, surfeitive quality of magnolia petals—the face which had unawares destroyed three lives—and I knew now why Charles Bon’s guardian had sent him all the way to North Mississippi to attend school, and what to a Henry Sutpen born, created by long time, with what he was and what he believed and thought, would be worse than the marriage and which compounded the bigamy to where the pistol was not only justified, but inescapable.
“That’s all there is in it,” the negro woman said. Her hand came out from beneath the worn, mudstained khaki army overcoat which she wore across her shoulders. She took the picture. She glanced once at it before closing it: a glance blank or dull, I could not tell which. I could not tell if she had ever seen the photograph or the face before, or if she was not even aware that she had never seen either of them before. “I reckon you better let me have it.”
A Portrait of Elmer
1
Elmer drinks beer upon the terrace of the Dome, with Angelo beside him. Beside him too, close against his leg, is a portfolio. It is quite new and quite flat. Sitting so among the artists he gazes across the boulevard Montparnasse and seems to gaze through the opposite gray building violetroofed and potted smugly with tile against the darkling sky, and across Paris itself and France and across the cold restless monotony of the Atlantic itself, so that for the twilit and nostalgic moment he looks about in lonely retrospect upon that Texas scene into which his mother’s unselfish trying ambition had haled at implacable long last his resigned and static father and himself, young then still and blond awkward, alone remaining of all the children, thinking of Circumstance as a tireless detachment like the Postoffice Department, getting people here and there, using them or not at all obscurely, returning them with delayed impersonal efficiency or not at all.
He remarks on this. Angelo awaits his pleasure with unfailing attentive courtesy as always, with that spirit of laissez-faire which rules their relationship, claims the same privilege himself and replies in Italian. To Elmer it sounds as though Angelo is making love to him, and while autumn and twilight mount Montparnasse gravely Elmer sits in a warm bath of words that mean nothing whatever to him, caressing his warming beer and watching girls in a standardised exciting uniformity of dress and accompanied by men with and without beards, and he reaches down his hand quietly and lightly and touches the portfolio briefly, wondering which among the men are the painters and which again the good painters, thinking Hodge, the artist. Hodge, the artist. Autumn and twilight mount Montparnasse gravely.
Angelo, with his extreme vest V-ing the soiled kaleidoscopic bulge of his cravat, with a thin purplish drink before him, continues to form his periods with a fine high obliviousness of the fact that Elmer has learned no Italian whatever. Meaningless, his words seem to possess an aesthetic significance, passionate and impersonal, so that at last Elmer stops thinking Hodge, the artist and looks at Angelo again with the old helpless dismay, thinking How to interrupt with his American crudeness the other’s inexhaustible flow of courteous protective friendship? For Angelo, with an affable tact which Elmer believed no American could ever attain, had established a relationship between them which had got far beyond and above any gross question of money; he had established himself in Elmer’s life with the silken affability of a prince in a city of barbarians. And now what is he to do, Elmer wonders. He cannot have Angelo hanging around him much longer. Here, in Paris, he will soon be meeting people; soon he will join an atelier, (again his hand touches lightly and briefly the briefcase against his leg) when he has had a little more time to get acclimated, and has learned a little more French, thinking quickly Yes. Yes. That’s it. When I have learned a little more French, so that I can choose the best one to show it to, since it must be the best. Yes yes. That is it. Besides, he might run into Myrtle on the street any day. And to have her learn that he and Angelo were inseparable and that he must depend on Angelo for the very food he eats. Now that they are well away from Venice and the dungeon of the Palazzo Ducale, he no longer regrets his incarceration, for it is of such things—life in the raw—that artists are made. But he does regret having been in the same jail with Angelo, and at times he finds himself regretting with an ingratitude which he knows Angelo would never be capable of, that Angelo had got out at all. Then he thinks suddenly, hopefully, again with secret shame, Maybe that would be the best thing, after all. Myrtle will know
how to get rid of Angelo; certainly Mrs Monson will.
Angelo’s voice completes a smooth period. But now Elmer is not even wondering what Angelo is talking about; again he gazes across the clotting of flimsy tables and the serried ranks of heads and shoulders drinking in two sexes and five languages, at the seemingly endless passing throng, watching the young girls white and soft and canny and stupid, with troubling bodies which he must believe were virginal, wondering why certain girls chose you and others do not. At one time he believed that you can seduce them; now he is not so sure. He believes now that they just elect you when they happen to be in the right mood and you happen to be handy. But surely you are expected to learn from experience (meaning a proved unhappiness you did get as compared with a possible one that missed you) if not how to get what you want, at least the reason why you did not get it. But who wants experience, when he can get any kind of substitute? To hell with experience, Elmer thinks, since all reality is unbearable. I want what I think I want when I think I want it, as all men do. Not a formula for stoicism, an antidote for thwarted desire. Autumn and twilight mount Montparnasse gravely.
Angelo, oblivious, verbose, and without selfconsciousness, continues to speak, nursing his thin dark drink in one hand. His hair is oiled sleekly backward; his face is shaven and blue as a pirate’s. On either side of his brief snubbed nose his brown eyes are spaced and melting and sad as a highly bred dog’s. His suit, after six weeks, is reasonably fresh and new, as are his cloth topped shoes, and he still has his stick. It is one of those slender jointed bamboo sticks which remain palpably and assertively new up to the moment of loss or death, but the suit, save for the fact that he has not yet slept in it, is exactly like the one which Elmer prevailed on him to throw away in Venice. It is a mosaic of tan-and-gray checks which seems to be in a state of constant mild explosion all over Angelo, robbing him of any shape whatever, and there are enough amber buttons on it to render him bullet proof save at point blank range.