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From
a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary
dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called
the office because her father had called it that-a dim hot airless room
with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because
when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried
heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller
and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes
full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead
old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might
have blown them. There was a wistaria vine blooming for the second time
that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows
came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before
going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black
which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father,
or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard
chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as
if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air
of impotent and static rage like children's feet, and talking in that
grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense
self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable
frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked,
quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious
dust.
Her
voice would not cease, it would just vanish. There would be the dim coffin-smelling
gloom sweet and oversweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the
outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled,
into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of the sparrows like
a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female
old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched
him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too
tall chair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not
ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream,
a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused
with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a
more fortunate one would have had a house. Out of quiet thunderclap he
would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a
schoolprize water color, faint sulphur-reek still in hair clothes and
beard, with grouped behind him his band of wild niggers like beasts half
tamed to walk upright like men, in attitudes wild and reposed, and manacled
among them the French architect with his air grim, haggard, and tatterran.
Immobile, bearded and hand palm-lifted the horseman sat; behind him the
wild blacks and the captive architect huddled quietly, carrying in bloodless
paradox the shovels and picks and axes of peaceful conquest. Then in the
long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch them overrun suddenly the hundred
square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal
gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like
cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating
the Sutpen's Hundred, the Be Sutpen's Hundred like the oldentime Be Light.
Then hearing would reconcile and he would seem to listen to two separate
Quentins now-the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard in the South, the
deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled
ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused
to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times;
and the Quentin Compson who was still too young to deserve yet to be a
ghost but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born
and bred in the deep South the same as she was-the two separate Quentins
now talking to one another in the long silence of notpeople in notlanguage,
like this: It seems that this demon-his name was Sutpen-(Colonel Sutpen)-Colonel
Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with
a band of strange niggers and built a plantation -(Tore violently a plantation,
Miss Rosa Coldfield says)-tore violently. And married her sister Ellen
and begot a son and a daughter which-(Without gentleness begot, Miss Rosa
Coldfield says)-without gentleness. Which should have been the jewels
of his pride and the shield and comfort of his old age, only-(Only they
destroyed him or something or he destroyed them or something. And died)-and
died. Without regret, Miss Rosa Coldfield says-(Save by her) Yes, save
by her. (And by Quentin Compson) Yes. And by Quentin Compson.
"Because
you are going away to attend the college at Harvard they tell me," she
said. "So I dont imagine you will ever come back here and settle down
as a country lawyer in a little town like Jefferson since Northern people
have already seen to it that there is little left in the South for a young
man. So maybe you will enter the literary profession as so many Southern
gentlemen and gentlewomen too are doing now and maybe some day you will
remember this and write about it. You will be married then I expect and
perhaps your wife will want a new gown or a new chair for the house and
you can write this and submit it to the magazines. Perhaps you will even
remember kindly then the old woman who made you spend a whole afternoon
sitting indoors and listening while she talked about people and events
you were fortunate enough to escape yourself when you wanted to be out
among young friends of your own age." "Yessum," Quentin said. Only she
dont mean that he thought.
It's
because she wants it told. It was still early then. He had yet in his
pocket the note which he had received by the hand of a small negro boy
just before noon, asking him to call and see her-the quaint, stiffly formal
request which was actually a summons, out of another world almost-the
queer archaic sheet of ancient good notepaper written over with the neat
faded cramped script which, due to his astonishment at the request from
a woman three times his age and whom he had known all his life without
having exchanged a hundred words with her or perhaps to the fact that
he was only twenty years old, he did not recognise as revealing a character
cold, implacable, and even ruthless. He obeyed it immediately after the
noon meal, walking the half mile between his home and hers through the
dry dusty heat of early September and so into the house (it too somehow
smaller than its actual size-it was of two storeys-unpainted and a little
shabby, yet with an air, a quality of grim endurance as though like her
it had been created to fit into and complement a world in all ways a little
smaller than the one in which it found itself) where in the gloom of the
shuttered hallway whose air was even hotter than outside, as if there
were prisoned in it like in a tomb all the suspiration of slow heat-laden
time which had recurred during the forty-three years, the small figure
in black which did not even rustle, the wan triangle of lace at wrists
and throat, the dim face looking at him with an expression speculative,
urgent, and intent, waited to invite him in. It's because she wants it
told he thought so that people whom she will never see and whose names
she will never hear and who have never heard her name nor seen her face
will read it and know at last why God let us lose the War: that only through
the blood of our men and the tears of our women could He stay this demon
and efface his name and lineage from the earth. Then almost immediately
he decided that neither was this the reason why she had sent the note,
and sending it, why to him, since if she had merely wanted it told, written
and even printed, she would not have needed to call in anybody-a woman
who even in his (Quentin's) father's youth had already established (even
if not affirmed) herself as the town's and the county's poetess laureate
by issuing to the stern and meagre subscription list of the county newspaper
poems, ode eulogy and epitaph, out of some bitter and implacable reserve
of undefeat; and these from a woman whose family's martial background
as both town and county knew consisted of the father who, a conscientious
objector on religious grounds, had starved to death in the attic of his
own house, hidden (some said, walled up) there from Confederate provost
marshals' men and fed secretly at night by this same daughter who at the
very time was accumulating her first folio in which the lost cause's unregenerate
vanquished were name by name embalmed; and the nephew who served for four
years in the same company with his sister's fiance and then shot the fiance
to death before the gates to the house where the sister waited in her
wedding gown on the eve of the wedding and then fled, vanished, none knew
where.
It
would be three hours yet before he would learn why she had sent for him
because this part of it, this first part of it, Quentin already knew.
It was a part of his twenty years' heritage of breathing the same air
and hearing his father talk about the man; a part of the town's-Jefferson's-eighty
years' heritage of the same air which the man himself had breathed between
this September afternoon in 1909 and that Sunday morning in June in 1833
when he first rode into town out of no discernible past and acquired his
land no one knew how and built his house, his mansion, apparently out
of nothing and married Ellen Coldfield and begot his two children-the
son who widowed the daughter who had not yet been a bride-and so accomplished
his allotted course to its violent (Miss Coldfield at least would have
said, just) end. Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable
and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an
empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an
entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn
back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward,
from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without
even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against
and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond
the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever
yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of
impotence.
("But
why tell me about it?" he said to his father that evening, when he returned
home, after she had dismissed him at last with his promise to return for
her in the buggy; "why tell me about it? What is it to me that the land
or the earth or whatever it was got tired of him at last and turned and
destroyed him? What if it did destroy her family too? It's going to turn
and destroy us all someday, whether our name happens to be Sutpen or Coldfield
or not."
"Ah,"
Mr Compson said. "Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies.
Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we
do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?" Then he said, "Do
you want to know the real reason why she chose you?" They were sitting
on the gallery after supper, waiting for the time Miss Coldfield had set
for Quentin to call for her. "It's because she will need someone to go
with her-a man, a gentleman, yet one still young enough to do what she
wants, do it the way she wants it done. And she chose you because your
grandfather was the nearest thing to a friend which Sutpen ever had in
this county, and she probably believes that Sutpen may have told your
grandfather something about himself and her, about that engagement which
did not engage, that troth which failed to plight. Might even have told
your grandfather the reason why at the last she refused to marry him.
And that your grandfather might have told me and I might have told you.
And so, in a sense, the affair, no matter what happens out there tonight,
will still be in the family; the skeleton (if it be a skeleton) still
in the closet. She may believe that if it hadn't been for your grandfather's
friendship, Sutpen could never have got a foothold here, and that if he
had not got that foothold, he could not have married Ellen. So maybe she
considers you partly responsible through heredity for what happened to
her and her family through him.")
Whatever
her reason for choosing him, whether it was that or not, the getting to
it, Quentin thought, was taking a long time. Meanwhile, as though in inverse
ratio to the vanishing voice, the invoked ghost of the man whom she could
neither forgive nor revenge herself upon began to assume a quality almost
of solidity, permanence. Itself circumambient and enclosed by its effluvium
of hell, its aura of unregeneration, it mused (mused, thought, seemed
to possess sentience, as if, though dispossessed of the peace-who was
impervious anyhow to fatigue-which she declined to give it, it was still
irrevocably outside the scope of her hurt or harm) with that quality peaceful
and now harmless and not even very attentive-the ogre-shape which, as
Miss Coldfield's voice went on, resolved out of itself before Quentin's
eyes the two half-ogre children, the three of them forming a shadowy background
for the fourth one. This was the mother, the dead sister Ellen: this Niobe
without tears who had conceived to the demon in a kind of nightmare, who
even while alive had moved but without life and grieved but without weeping,
who now had an air of tranquil and unwitting desolation, not as if she
had either outlived the others or had died first, but as if she had never
lived at all. Quentin seemed to see them, the four of them arranged into
the conventional family group of the period, with formal and lifeless
decorum, and seen now as the fading and ancient photograph itself would
have been seen enlarged and hung on the wall behind and above the voice
and of whose presence there the voice's owner was not even aware, as if
she (Miss Coldfield) had never seen this room before-a picture, a group
which even to Quentin had a quality strange, contradictory and bizarre;
not quite comprehensible, not (even to twenty) quite right-a group the
last member of which had been dead twenty-five years and the first, fifty,
evoked now out of the airless gloom of a dead house between an old woman's
grim and implacable unforgiving and the passive chafing of a youth of
twenty telling himself even amid the voice Maybe you have to know anybody
awful well to love them but when you have hated somebody for forty-three
years you will know them awful well so maybe it's better then maybe it's
fine then because after forty-three years they cant any longer surprise
you or make you either very contented or very mad. And maybe it (the voice,
the talking, the incredulous and unbearable amazement) had even been a
cry aloud once, Quentin thought, long ago when she was a girl-of young
and indomitable unregret, of indictment of blind circumstance and savage
event; but not now: now only the lonely thwarted old female flesh embattled
for forty-three years in the old insult, the old unforgiving outraged
and betrayed by the final and complete affront which was Sutpen's death:
Excerpted
from Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. Copyright 1991 by William
Faulkner. Excerpted by permission of Vintage, a division of Random House,
Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or
reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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