Sanctuary

Then he just squalled, meaningless, vertiginous; to Horace it was like

sitting before a series of printed pages turned in furious snatches '

leaving a series of cryptic, headless and tailless evocations on the mind.

"She's travelled a thousand miles without a ticket."

"Marge too."

"Beth too."

"Duh-duh-duh."

"Marge too."

"I'm going to punch mine Friday night."

"Eeeeyow."

SANCTUARY 97

"Do you like liver?"

"I can't reach that far."

"Eceeeyow."

They whistled, clapping their heels on the floor to furious crescendo,

saying duh-duh-duh. The first jolted the seat back against Horace's head.

He rose. "Come on," he said. "He's done gone." Again the seat jarred into

Horace and he watched them return and join the group that blocked the

aisle, saw one of them lay his bold, rough hand flat upon one of the

bright, soft faces uptilted to them. Beyond the group a countrywoman with

an infant in her arms stood braced against a seat. From time to time she

looked back at the blocked aisle and the empty seats beyond.

At Oxford he descended into a throng of them at the station, hatless, in

bright dresses, now and then with books in their hands and surrounded

still by swarms of colored shirts. Impassable, swinging hands with their

escorts, objects of casual and puppyish pawings, they dawdled up the hill

toward the college, swinging their little hips, looking at Horace with

cold, blank eyes as he stepped off the walk in order to pass them.

At the top of the hill three paths diverged through a broad grove beyond

which, in green vistas, buildings in red brick or gray stone gleamed, and

where a clear soprano bell began to ring. The procession became three

streams, thinning rapidly upon the dawdling couples, swinging hands,

strolling in crratic surges, lurching into one another with puppyish

squeals, with the random intense purposelessness of children.

The broader path led to the postoffice. He entered and waited until the

window was clear.

"I'm trying to find a young lady, Miss Temple Drake. I probably just

missed her, didn't IT'

"She's not here any longer," the clerk said. "She quit school about two

weeks ago." He was young: a dull, smooth face behind horn glasses, the

hair meticulous. After a time Horace heard himself asking quietly:

"You don't know where she went?"

The clerk looked at him. He leaned, lowering his voice: "Are you another

detective?"

"Yes," Horace said, "yes. No matter. It doesn't matter." Then he was

walking quietly down the steps, into the sunlight again. He stood there

while on both sides of him they passed in a steady stream of little

colored dresses, bare-armed, with close bright heads, with that identical

cool, innocent, unabashed expression which he knew well in their eyes,

above the savage identical paint upon their mouths; like music moving,

like honey poured in sunlight, pagan and evanescent and serene, thinly

evocative of all lost days and outpaced delights,

98 WILLIAM FAULKNER

in the sun. Bright, trembling with heat, it lay in open glades of miragelike

glimpses of stone or brick: columns without tops, towers apparently floating

above a green cloud in slow ruin against the southwest wind, sinister,

imponderable, bland; and he standing there listening to the sweet cloistral

bell, thinking Now what? What now? and answering himself: Why, nothing.

Nothing. It's finished.

He returned to the station an hour before the train was due, a filled but

unlighted cob pipe in his hand. In the lavatory he saw, scrawled on the

foul, stained wall, her pencilled name, Temple Drake. He read it quietly,

his head bent, slowly fingering the unlighted pipe.

A half hour before the train came they began to gather, strolling down the

hill and gathering along the platform with thin, bright, raucous laughter,

their blonde legs monotonous, their bodies moving continually inside their

scant garments with that awkward and voluptuous purposelessness of the

young.

The return train carried a pullman. He went on through the day coach and

entered it. There was only one other occupant: a man in the center of the

car, next the window, bareheaded, leaning back, his elbow on the window

sill and an unlighted cigar in his ringed hand. When the train drew away

passing the sleek crowds in increasing reverse, the other passenger rose

and went forward toward the day coach. He carried an overcoat on his arm,

and a soiled, light-colored felt hat. With the corner of his eye Horace saw

his hand fumbling at his breast pocket, and he remarked the severe trim of

hair across the man's vast, soft, white neck. Like with a guillotine,

Horace thought, watching the man sidle past the porter in the aisle and

vanish, passing out of his sight and his mind in the act of flinging the

hat onto his head. The train sped on, swaying on the curves, flashing past

an occasional house, through cuts and across valleys where young cotton

wheeled slowly in fanlike rows.

The train checked speed; a jerk came back, and four whistle-blasts. The man

in the soiled hat entered, taking a cigar from his breast pocket. He came