Sanctuary

as two acquaintances stopped to pass the time of day before entering

church.

"Are you coming?" he said. "Are you?"

"I cant. It's down to my stocking now. Look." She lifted her skirt away

in a shrinking gesture, then she dropped the skirt and rose again, her

torso arching backward, her soundless mouth open as he gripped her. He

released her.

"Will you come now?"

She came out from behind the barrel. He took her arm.

"It's all over the back of my coat," she whimpered. "Look."

"You're all right. I'll get you another coat tomorrow. Come on.,,

They returned to the car. At the comer she hung back

80 WILLIAM FAULKNER

again. "You want some more of it, do you?" he whispered not touching her.

"Do you?" She went on and got into the car quietly. Be took the wheel.

"Here, I got you a sandwich." He took it from his pocket and put it in her

hand. "Come on, now. Eat it." She took a bite obediently. He started the

car and took the Memphis road. Again, the bitten sandwich in her hand, she

ceased chewing and opened her mouth in that round, hopeless expression of

a child; again his hand left the wheel and gripped the back of her neck

and she sat motionless, gazing straight at him, her mouth open and the

half chewed mass of bread and meat lying upon her tongue.

They reached Memphis in midafternoon. At the foot of the bluff below Main

Street Popeye turned into a narrow street of smoke-grimed frame houses

with tiers of wooden galleries set a little back in grassless plots, and

now and then a forlorn and hardy tree of some shabby species-gaunt,

lopbranched magnolias, a stunted elm or a locust in grayish, cadaverous

bloom -interspersed by rear ends of garages; a scrap-heap in a vacant

lot; a low doored cavern of an equivocal appearance where an

oilcloth-covered counter and a row of backless stools, a metal coffee-urn

and a fat man in a dirty apron with a toothpick in his mouth, stood for

an instant out of the gloom with an effect as of a sinister and

meaningless photograph poorly made. From the bluff, beyond a line of

office buildings terraced sharply against the sunfilled sky, came a sound

of traffic-motor horns, trolleys-passing high overhead on the river

breeze; at the end of the street a trolley materialised in the narrow gap

with an effect as of magic and vanished with a stupendous clatter. On a

second storey gallery a young negress in her underclothes smoked a

cigarette sullenly, her arms on the balustrade.

Popeye drew up before one of the dingy three-storey houses, the entrance

of which was hidden by a dingy lattice cubicle leaning a little awry. In

the grimy grassplot before it two of those small, woolly, white,

worm-like dogs, one with a pink, the other a blue, ribbon about its neck,

moved about with an air of sluggish and obscene paradox. In the sunlight

their coats looked as though they had been cleaned with gasoline.

Later Temple could hear them outside her door, whimpering and scuffing,

or, rushing thickly in when the negro maid opened the door, climbing and

sprawling onto the bed and into Miss Reba's lap with wheezy, flatulent

sounds, billowing into the rich pneumasis of her breast and tonguing

along the metal tankard which she waved in one ringed hand as she talked.

"Anybody in Memphis can tell you who Reba Rivers is. Ask

SANCTUARY 81

any man on the street, cop or not. I've had some of the biggest men in

Memphis right here in this house, bankers, lawyers, doctors-all of them.

I've had two police captains drinking beer in my dining-room and the

commissioner himself upstairs with one of my girls. They got drunk and

crashed the door in on him and found him buck-nekkid, dancing the highland

fling. A man fifty years old, seven foot tall, with a head like a peanut.

He was a fine fellow. He knew me. They all know Reba Rivers. Spent their

money here like water, they have. They know me. I aint never

double-crossed nobody, honey." She drank beer, breathing thickly into the

tankard, the other hand, ringed with yellow diamonds as large as gravel,

lost among the lush billows of her breast.

Her slightest movement appeared to be accomplished by an expenditure of

breath out of all proportion to any pleasure the movement could afford

her. Almost as soon as they entered the house she began to tell Temple

about her asthma, toiling up the stairs in front of them, planting her

feet heavily in worsted bedroom slippers, a wooden rosary in one hand and

the tankard in the other. She had just returned from church, in a black

silk gown and a hat savagely flowered; the lower half of the tankard was

still frosted with inner chill. She moved heavily from big thigh to

thigh, the two dogs moiling underfoot, talking steadily back across her

shoulder in a harsh, expiring, maternal voice.

"Popeye knew better than to bring you anywhere else but to my house. I

been after him for, how many years I been after you to get you a girl,

honey? What I say, a young fellow can't no more live without a girl than

. . ." Panting, she fell to cursing the dogs under her feet, stopping to