Sanctuary

like the children which beggars on Paris streets carry, its pinched face

slick with faint moisture, its hair a damp whisper of shadow across its

gaunt, veined skull, a thin crescent of white showing beneath its

lead-colored eyelids.

The woman wore a dress of gray crepe, neatly brushed and skilfully darned

by hand. Parallel with each seam was that faint, narrow, glazed imprint

which another woman would recognise at a hundred yards with one glance.

On the shoulder was a purple ornament of the sort that may be bought in

ten cent stores or by mail order; on the cot beside her lay a gray hat

with a neatly darned veil; looking at it, Benbow could not remember when

he had seen one before, when women ceased to wear veils.

He took the woman to his house. They walked, she carrying the child while

Benbow carried a bottle of milk, a few groceries, food in tin cans. The

child still slept. "Maybe you hold it too much," he said. "Suppose we get

a nurse for it."

He left her at the house and returned to town, to a telephone, and he

telephoned out to his sister's, for the car. The

66 WILLIAM FAULKNER

car came for him. He told his sister and Miss Jenny about the case over

the supper table.

"You're just meddling!" his sister said, her serene face, her voice,

furious. "When you took another rn~m's wife and child away from him I

thought it was dreadful, but I said At least he will not have the face

to ever come back here again. And when you just walked out of the house

like a nigger and left her I thought that was dreadful too, but I would

not let myself believe you meant to leave her for good. And then when you

insisted without any reason at all on leaving here and opening the house,

scrubbing it yourself and all the town looking on and living there like

a tramp, refusing to stay here where everybody would expect you to stay

and think it funny when you wouldn't; and now to deliberately mix

yourself up with a woman you said yourself was a streetwalker, a

murderer's woman."

"I cant help it. She has nothing, no one. In a made-over dress all neatly

about five years out of mode, and that child that never has been more

than half alive, wrapped in a piece of blanket scrubbed almost

cotton-white. Asking nothing of anyone except to be let alone, trying to

make something out of her life when all you sheltered chaste women-"

"Do you mean to say ~. moonshiner hasn't got the money to hire the best

lawyer in the country?" Miss Jenny said.

"It's not that," Horace said. "I'm sure he could get a better lawyer.

It's that-"

"Horace," his sister said. She had been watching him. "Where is that

woman?" Miss Jenny was watching him too, sitting a little forward in the

wheel chair. "Did you take that woman into my house?"

"It's my house too, honey." She did not know that for ten years he had

been lying to his wife in order to pay interest on a mortgage on the

stucco house he had built for her in Kinston, so that his sister might

not rent to strangers that other house in Jefferson which his wife did

not know he still owned any share in. "As long as it's vacant, and with

that child-"

"The house where my father and mother and your father and mother, the

house where 1-1 won't have it. I won't have it."

"Just for one night, then. I'll take her to the hotel in the morning.

Think of her, alone, with that baby. . . . Sup lose it were you and Bory,

and your husband accused of a murder you knew he didn't-"

"I dont want to think about her. I wish I had never heard of the whole

thing. To think that my brother- Dont you see that you are always having

to Cle~ln U,) i4ter yoursi~lf? It's not that there's a litter left; it's

that you-that- But to bring

SANCTUARY 67

a streetwalker, a murderess, into the house where I was born."

"Fiddlesticks," Miss Jenny said. "But, Horace, aint that what the lawyers

call collusion? connivance?" Horace looked at her. "It seems to me you've

already had a little more to do with these folks than the lawyer in the

case should have. You were out there where it happened yourself not long

ago. Folks might begin to think you know more than you've told."

"That's so," Horace said, "Mrs Blackstone. And sometimes I have wondered

why I haven't got rich at the law. Maybe I will, when I get old enough

to attend the same law school you did."

"If I were you," Miss Jenny said, "I'd drive back to town now and take

her to the hotel and get her settled. It's not late."

"And go on back to Kinston until the whole thing is over," Narcissa said.

"These people are not your people. Why must you do such things?"

"I cannot stand idly by and see injustice-"

"You wont ever catch up with injustice, Horace," Miss Jenny said.

"Well, that irony which lurks in events, then."

"Hmmph," Miss Jenny said. "It must be because she is one woman you know

that dont know anything about that shrimp."

"Anyway, I've talked too much, as usual," Horace said. "So I'll have to

trust you all-"

"Fiddlesticks," Miss Jenny said. "Do you think Narcissa'd want anybody

to know that any of her folks could know people that would do anything