Sanctuary

shadows in the doorways; it might be the same morning and he had merely

crossed the square, about-faced and was returning; all between a dream

filled with all the ni-htm are shapes it had taken him forty-three years to

invent, concentrated in a hot, hard lump in his stomach. Suddenly he was

walking fast, the coffee jolting like a hot, heavy rock inside him.

126 WILLIAM FAULKNER

He walked quietly up the drive, beginning to smell the honeysuckle from

the fence. The house was dark, still, as though it were marooned in space

by the ebb of all time. The insects had fallen to a low monotonous pitch,

everywhere, nowhere, spent, as though the sound were the chemical agony

of a world left stark and dying above the tide-edge of the fluid in which

it lived and breathed. The moon stood overhead, but without light; the

earth lay beneath, without darkness. He opened the door and felt his way

into the room and to the light. The voice of the night-insects, whatever

it was -had followed him into the house; he knew suddenly that it was the

friction of the earth on its axis, approaching that moment when it must

decide to turn on or to remain forever still: a motionless ball in

cooling space, across which a thick smell of honeysuckle writhed like

cold smoke.

He found the light and turned it on. The photograph sat on the dresser.

He took it up, holding it in his hands. Enclosed by the narrow imprint

of the missing frame Little Belle's face dreamed with that quality of

sweet chiaroscuro. Communicated to the cardboard by some quality of the

light or perhaps by some infinitesimal movement of his hands, his own

breathing, the face appeared to breathe in his palms in a shallow bath

of highlight, beneath the slow, smokelike tongues of invisible

honeysuckle. Almost palpable enough to be seen, the scent filled the room

and the small face seemed to swoon in a voluptuous languor, blurring

still more, fading, leaving upon his eye a soft and fading aftermath of

invitation and voluptuous promise and secret affirmation like a scent it-

self.

Then he knew what that sensation in his stomach meant. He put the

photograph down hurriedly and went to the bathroom. He opened the door

running and fumbled at the light. But he had not time to find it and he

gave over and plunged forward and struck the lavatory and leaned upon his

braced arms while the shucks set up a terrific uproar beneath her thighs.

Lying with her head lifted slightly, her chin depressed like a figure

lifted down from a crucifix, she watched something black and furious go

roaring out of her pale body. She was bound naked on her back on a flat

car moving at speed through a black tunnel, the blackness streaming in

rigid threads overhead, a roar of iron wheels in her ears. The car shot

bodily from the tunnel in a long upward slant, the darkness overhead now

shredded with parallel attenuations of living fire, toward a crescendo

like a held breath, an interval in which would swing faintly and lazily

in nothingness filled with pale, myriad points of light. Far beneath she

could hear the faint, furious uproar of the shucks.

XXIV

THE FIRST TIME TEMPLE WENT TO THE HEAD OF THE STAIRS Minnie's eyeballs

rolled out of the dusky light beside Miss Reba's door. Leaning once more

within her bolted door Temple heard Miss Reba toil up the stairs and knock.

Temple leaned silently against the door while Miss Reba panted and wheezed

beyond it with a mixture of blandishment and threat. She made no sound.

After a while Miss Reba went back down the stairs.

Temple turned from the door and stood in the center of the room, beating

her hands silently together her eyes black in her livid face. She wore a

street dress, a nat. She removed the hat and hurled it into a corner and

went and flung herself face down upon the bed. The bed had not been made.

The table beside it was littered with cigarette stubs, the adjacent floor

strewn with ashes. The pillow slip on that side was spotted with brown

holes. Often in the night she would wake to smell tobacco and to see the

single ruby eye where Popeye's mouth would be.

It was midmorning. A thin bar of sunlight fell beneath the drawn shade of

the south window, lying upon the sill and then upon the floor in a narrow

band. The house was utterly quiet, with that quality as of spent breathing

which it had in the midmorning. Now and then a car passed in the street be-

neath.

Temple turned over on the bed. When she did so she saw one of Popeye's

innumerable black suits lying across a chair. She lay looking at it for a

while, then she rose and snatched the garments up and hurled them into the

corner where the hat was. In another corner was a closet improvised by a

print curtain. It contained dresses of all sorts and all new. She ripped

them down in furious wads and flung them after the suit, and a row of hats

from a shelf. Another of Popeye's suits hung there also. She flung it down.

Behind it, hanging from a nail, was an automatic pistol in a holster of

oiled silk. She took it down gingerly and removed the pistol and stood with